Hey, something crazy happened in the Canucks’ game last night!

No, not the fact that Vancouver stormed back after being down 2-0 to the Los Angeles Kings, one of the best teams in the Western Conference and widely known around the league as being a defensive fortress.

We’re referring to Derek Dorsett dropping the gloves with Andy Andreoff early in the first period. If you’re wondering why this is a huge deal, you’re not alone. Derek Dorsett is ostensibly part of the NHL’s new era of enforcers, a dude who can play on the bottom two lines (you’d hope he’d be there, anyway), not do anything stupid defensively, forecheck hard and beat the crap out of someone if he needs to. If he scores a goal or two, that’s gravy.

So when Dorsett took on the bigger Andreoff, #Canucks twitter had a straight up conniption. Suffice it to say, most of the brouhaha (not the actual fight, which we’ll call a slight edge to Andreoff) has been captured by other outlets. We won’t rehash the details here, except to say that a young Canucks writer called into question how much Dorsett getting into the fight sparked his team. An older Canucks writer then stated that, actually, according to the younger writer’s much-ballyhooed analytics, it did spark his team.

And then the site that’s known for writing clickbaity headlines without much substance in the actual pieces wrote a clickbaity headline on an opinion piece that said little to nothing.

Yeah, that all happened. Call it a regular away game, one supposes. Here’s betting none of this happens if the Canucks play the Kings at home. It would be a bit awkward for journalists to be sniping each other when they're both hitting the candy bar that gets put out in the press box between periods.

At the risk of entering something that almost definitely doesn’t need to be commented on, here we go.

Derek Dorsett fought someone. He’s done it before, many times. Fans cheered, as they do. Players on both sides of the bench stood up, as they do. A player on the Canucks said that it pumped up the team, as he more or less had to do. 

We don’t have analytics to measure how much every Canuck’s heart rate went up, or how much every guy on the bench felt “fired up” by the fight (coming soon to a robotized future near you!). We do know that, very generally, it’s human to feel passion when someone stands up for you. Whenever a player fights another and it’s regarded as being “for his team”, you can bet hockey players will feel that reverberate through the bench and onto them. So sure, it pumped them up.

Does Derek Dorsett deserve his spot on the team? That’s a completely different conversation. He’s scored goals but has been almost completely outplayed by the other team when he’s on the ice. Yes, you could say he’s played well thus far. It’s also definitely not a reason to trust him going forward. At the best of times he’s still somewhat of a liability, and at the worst, he’s hard to watch.

But as long as NHL rules state that an individual is allowed to drop his gloves and smash the other team’s biggest guy in the face, it’s beneficial to have someone on your team that’s willing to do that from time to time.

It’s also helpful if that guy isn’t also supposed to be one of your top defenders, like those years when Kevin Bieksa was the only Canuck that would throw down, leaving the team’s bottom-pairing defenders with more ice time they couldn’t handle (yeah, I’m talking about Luca Sbisa and Yannick Weber).

Coaches like Travis Green love players like Dorsett because they can’t stand the thought of their teams being “soft.” That way of thinking is outdated to those that think the game runs on speed and skill, which it does. Problem is, Green also emphasizes those qualities.

Derek Dorsett fought someone. The Canucks won the game. There’s a reason there’s an analytic tool used in hockey to effectively measure luck: a large percentage of what happens on the ice is random. If your guys are supposedly playing with more passion than usual, well that probably can’t hurt things right? It's also probably a benefit to have Dorsett in the box for five minutes. 

OK great, let’s never talk about this again.