Brenden Dillon had a reason for what he did. The New Jersey Devils were down 4-2 in the third period on Tuesday, three days removed from a 6-0 hiding by the Islanders, and the veteran defenseman went looking for something to wake his team up after a hit on Jonas Siegenthaler.
He picked Jack McBain, and it didn’t go the way he intended.
The two are almost identically built, both 6-foot-4 with Dillon carrying seven pounds more at 225, which made for a straight heavyweight exchange with no size advantage to speak of. They traded haymakers for a while before McBain started landing the better of them and finished the job by pulling Dillon’s jersey up over his head.
Who won the Jack McBain and Brenden Dillon fight?
The Hockey Writers called it one of the best fights of McBain’s career, noting that Dillon was looking for energy and instead took a series of what they described as fantastic punches. Nobody watching came away with a different reading.
“Holy s***, that McBain punch. Dillon’s grandkids are gonna have concussions,” one fan wrote.
“Jack McBain just sent Brenden Dillon to hell,” another said, while a third called it the “highlight of the year so far.”
Both men took fighting majors at 5:36 of the third, with Dillon picking up an additional roughing minor that Timo Meier served.
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McBain is well suited to this sort of evening. The Utah center led the Mammoth with 84 penalty minutes last season, and finished Tuesday with five minutes, three hits and 13:12 of ice time.
Dillon turns 36 next month and should pass 1,100 regular-season games this season if he stays healthy, which is a long way of saying he has done this plenty of times before and usually fares better.
The spark never came either. Utah held on for a 5-3 win, with Nick Schmaltz scoring his league-leading fifth goal of the season, and the Mammoth collected the first victory over New Jersey in franchise history.
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