Tony Twist Fight Record: Every Opponent, Every Team

Tony Twist fought 105 times in 445 NHL games. Here are the teams he faced, compiled from his season-by-season fight cards and paired with his penalty minutes against each opponent.

Two things stand out immediately. Chicago accounted for 12 of the 105, more than any other club. And one opponent, Jim McKenzie, met him five times while wearing three different sweaters.

The third thing takes a moment longer. The club Twist was least penalized against over eleven meetings was the franchise he spent four seasons with.

Tony Twist’s fights and penalty minutes against every NHL team

Penalty minutes and games from his career opponent splits. The fight column compiles our ten-season fight cards, with a caveat at the end. Ranked by penalty minutes per game. Career rate: 2.52.

Opponent	GP	PIM	PIM/GP	Fights
Nashville Predators	5	27	5.40	3
Boston Bruins	16	79	4.94	6
Pittsburgh Penguins	11	45	4.09	3
Edmonton Oilers	23	90	3.91	6
Montreal Canadiens	22	79	3.59	7
Carolina Hurricanes	20	69	3.45	7
Chicago Blackhawks	26	84	3.23	12
Vancouver Canucks	20	64	3.20	6
Washington Capitals	13	39	3.00	5
Buffalo Sabres	18	51	2.83	1
Ottawa Senators	11	31	2.82	3
Philadelphia Flyers	16	40	2.50	4
San Jose Sharks	14	34	2.43	2
New York Rangers	17	39	2.29	2
New Jersey Devils	13	29	2.23	5
Calgary Flames	23	48	2.09	4
Winnipeg Jets	12	25	2.08	5
Toronto Maple Leafs	26	53	2.04	5
Dallas Stars	23	44	1.91	4
St. Louis Blues	5	9	1.80	1
Florida Panthers	8	14	1.75	2
Anaheim Ducks	16	27	1.69	3
Detroit Red Wings	27	42	1.56	2
Tampa Bay Lightning	9	14	1.56	2
New York Islanders	11	14	1.27	2
Colorado Avalanche	11	9	0.82	1
Los Angeles Kings	17	13	0.76	1
Arizona Coyotes	12	9	0.75	1
Career	445	1,121	2.52	105

Four rows need a note, because the splits name every franchise by what it is called now rather than what it was called then.

Row	What it was during his career
Carolina Hurricanes	the Hartford Whalers until 1996-97, and both spells are in the same row
Colorado Avalanche	the Quebec Nordiques until 1994-95, which is the club Twist played for from 1990-91 to 1993-94
Dallas Stars	the Minnesota North Stars until 1992-93
Arizona Coyotes	the Phoenix Coyotes, who arrived in 1996-97
Winnipeg Jets	the original Winnipeg Jets, who left for Phoenix in 1996. Every Twist fight against them is dated between 1989 and 1995, which is how we know the row is not the later franchise

Which team did Twist fight most?

Chicago, 12 times, which is six more than any other club and nearly a fifth of his entire career total against one opponent.

The Chicago number isn’t a single rivalry. Twelve fights against seven different Blackhawks: Wayne Van Dorp twice in his rookie season, Dave Manson, Mike Peluso, Bob Probert three times, Jim Cummins, Reid Simpson twice, and Dennis Bonvie twice. The last two came in his final season, when Bonvie faced him twice within two months.

After Chicago, the list thins fast. Montreal and Carolina sit at seven, then Boston, Edmonton and Vancouver at six.

Which opponents did Twist fight most?

This is where the compilation produces something no table of teams can show.

Opponent	Fights	For which clubs
Jim McKenzie	5	Hartford three times, Winnipeg once, Phoenix once
Mike Peluso	4	Chicago, Ottawa, New Jersey twice
Bob Probert	4	Detroit once, Chicago three times
Patrick Cote	4	Nashville three times, Dallas once
Craig Berube	3	Philadelphia twice, Washington once
Gino Odjick	3	Vancouver, all three

Three of his six most-fought opponents were men he followed across the league rather than men he met in a divisional rivalry. McKenzie moved from Hartford to Winnipeg to Phoenix and Twist fought him at every stop. Peluso went from Chicago to Ottawa to New Jersey and Twist fought him at all three.

Patrick Cote is the oddest entry. All four of those fights came in Twist’s last two seasons, and three of them were against Nashville in 1998-99, the franchise’s first year in the league. Three of the nine fights in his final season were against the same player on the same expansion team.

How many times did Twist fight Bob Probert?

Four times, and the pattern matters because the pairing has a reputation bigger than its record.

The first was on 30 October 1993, with Probert in Detroit. The other three came after Probert moved to Chicago: 8 February 1996, 24 October 1996 and 13 December 1996. They never fought again after that December night, although the schedule put them on the same ice afterward.

Our own head-to-head work on the pair, built by matching their game logs on the league’s own game identifier, found sixteen shared games and no playoff meetings. Both men took fewer penalty minutes per game against each other than they averaged against the rest of the league, the opposite of what their reputations suggest.

Which team was he most penalized against?

By rate, Nashville, at 5.40 penalty minutes a game. Read that one carefully: it is five games, all in 1998-99, and three of them produced a Cote fight. It is a true figure and a tiny sample.

The rate that holds up is Boston: 79 penalty minutes in sixteen games, 4.94 a game, almost double his career average, across six fights involving five different Bruins.

By raw total, it is Edmonton, 90 minutes in 23 games, which is the single largest number in the table.

And the bottom of the table contains the detail that is hard to read as coincidence. His three lowest rates are Phoenix at 0.75, Los Angeles at 0.76, and Colorado at 0.82, the Quebec franchise he played 151 games for. Eleven meetings with his old club produced nine penalty minutes and one fight.

Something similar sits further up. The St. Louis row covers only five games, because St. Louis was his own club for six of his ten seasons; those five are the games he played against them from Quebec. One of them produced a fight against Darin Kimble, the player St. Louis received when they traded Twist away.

Why did Tony Twist stop playing?

Not a decision. On 9 August 1999, a car cut across his motorcycle near St. Louis, and the injuries ended his career at 31.

The Spokesman-Review reported ten days later that he had broken and dislocated his pelvic ring, broken a toe and suffered a contusion to his left knee, and that internal bleeding was the life-threatening part, delaying the pelvic surgery by nearly four days. The best-case return was about nine months, and possibly fourteen or more. He never played another NHL game.

He had been an unsigned free agent at the time. The Blues told him hours before the accident that they would not renew his contract.

How reliable is the fight column?

The NHL has never kept fight statistics. There is no official count of anybody’s fights, which is why the published totals for Twist are 105 on hockeyfights’ own player page, 100 in that same site’s written profile of him, and 104 elsewhere. Three numbers, two of them on one domain, contradicting each other.

Our table uses the season cards, which are the most granular version of that register. But it is a compilation by hockey supporters, not a league record, and the fight column should be read as the best available account rather than as a statistic.

The penalty-minute column is different. That comes from the league’s own game data, and the 28 rows sum to 445 games and 1,121 minutes, which is exactly his career line.