Rangers-Capitals game quickly became a brawl-filled mess over the Tom Wilson debacle

And the NHL could have possibly avoided all of this.

The Washington Capitals road rematch against the New York Rangers at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday began exactly as many hockey fans expected it to — with a brawl.

In Monday night’s game in New York, Capitals winger Tom Wilson took a cheap shot to the back of Rangers’ Pavel Buchnevich’s head before body-slamming and injuring Artemi Panarin and starting a brawl near the crease. It was a violent moment that people have come to expect from Wilson, but rather than being suspended — and Wilson is all too familiar with lengthy suspensions — the NHL handed him a $5,000 fine.

And that didn’t sit too well with a lot of people, the Rangers included, and they blasted the NHL Department of Player Safety for not suspending Wilson.

And then the second the puck dropped for the teams’ rematch Wednesday, the gloves came off for an all-out line brawl.

It was an absolute mess with six penalties handed out literally within the first second of the game. And it’s likely that this ridiculousness could have been avoided if the league responded more appropriately to Wilson’s dangerous conduct in Monday’s game.

But the fighting didn’t stop there because Rangers’ Brendan Smith made sure to go after Wilson too, leading to more fighting, more penalties and an extremely crowded penalty box within the game’s first few minutes.

And, as Sportsnet Stats noted, this was the first game in NHL history to have six fights within the first five minutes and the first to have six fights in the first period since 1989.

By the time the first period ended, the teams racked up 20 penalties worth 100 minutes total.

It was a wild first period, and again, as many hockey fans noted, this chaos possibly could have been prevented or at least mitigated if the NHL dealt Wilson a harsher punishment beyond a $5,000 fine. And none of this is anything the league, the Rangers or the Capitals should be proud of.

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