Compared to what a hockey game was like in the ’90s, now it is just a friendly tea party of twelve big men. Relatively recently, each team had a player who ensured the safety of the leading players and also the spectacle of the game. Taugai (sometimes a police officer or bodyguard), his main task is to take the opposing forwards out of the game and not let them do the same to their own.
There is a difference between those who play power hockey, using brute force techniques and tafgai, the first, do not make their goal a fight, the second, if necessary, will drop the gloves and turn the ice into a kind of ring.
In the 90’s – the period of special demand for taiga players, such a player was in almost every team in the NHL. You could even say it was a necessity, because if a team that didn’t have a “bouncer” played against a team that did…well, the medics had a lot of work that day. So, in a way, the tag-teams helped keep particularly rowdy opposing players in check.
Spectators also really liked to watch the skirmishes during the game must have been something they didn’t know among the hockey players, they say at the time you could hear absolutely genuine indignation on the subject of too much play in hockey and not enough fighting.
These days, there’s no telling what it would have come to.
And so there is no telling what hockey would have come to, maybe it would have slowly turned into a group combat sport, or maybe the taiga would have had a beneficial effect and opponents would simply have been afraid to use force against one another (which is unlikely). But after the 2004-2005 lockout, the tag-teams, as they were originally understood, began to fade away. And those who remained had to evolve from big kids who could barely stand on their skates, but could crush an opponent with one look into a fully-fledged player who can both shoot the puck and knock out an opponent if necessary.
My opinion – let hockey be technical, not forceful. After all, we have only one head, and if you hit it often and hard, it will not last long.