Earlier in the summer, we covered our top 5 Vancouver Canucks fights of the 2024-2025 season. You can rewatch all of these fights here:

#5 – Dakota Joshua vs. Brady Tkachuk
#4 – JT Miller vs. Anthony Mantha
#3 – Dakota Joshua vs. Michael McCarron
#2 – Elias Pettersson vs. Logan O’Connor
#1 – Conor Garland vs. Erik Haula

For the halfway point of the Top 10 Canucks fights of all time, we have the late, great, Rick Rypien’s third feature on this series.

New Year’s Eve in 1997, the Canucks travelled to the Midwest for a battle against the St. Louis Blues. The game got off to a relatively slow start. The two teams combined for nine shots through the first 13 minutes of the game, so Rypien decided to spark some energy into the game.

Janssen goes into the Canucks zone chasing the dumped puck. As he’s swinging back, Rypien meets him at the net front, who clearly challenges him to a fight, and the players immediately drop the gloves.

Lined up in the slot area, Rypien goes in while protecting his head from any incoming punch Janssen may have thrown at him. After the players get set up, they begin to exchange right hands. Rypien especially was flinging his arms around, throwing anything he had toward Janssen.

Rypien connects with a right hand that looks to hurt Janssen, who ducks away for a second. But Rypien doesn’t stop there; he uses his left hand, which is holding the collar of Janssen’s jersey, to feed him some quick jabs. Janssen is now on the attack, lining up some big swings that just miss Rypien.

The Canucks enforcer does a great job at continuing to throw the quick jabs, which only set up a devastating right hand when Janssen wasn’t expecting it. This leaves Janssen with a bloody nose, and shortly after, the refs come in and stop the fight.

Rypien was given a game misconduct after the fight, as he was wearing tape around his hand. The NHL prohibits players from wearing tape around their hands below the wrist during fights to prevent players from using taped hands as a weapon to cause injury during fights.

Separating the game from the fight, the Canucks went down 3-0 with 25 minutes to play. However, goals from Daniel Sedin, Henrik Sedin, and Mikael Samuelsson pushed the game to extra time, where Christian Ehrhoff secured the Canucks two points in overtime.

HockeyFights voters gave this fight a 9.1/10 and heavily favoured Rypien, who earned 75% of the 429 votes. Janssen only received 7% of the votes, with 18% calling it a draw.

Our previously ranked top 10 Canucks fights of all time:

HM – Rick Rypien vs. Hal Gill
#10 – Scott Walker vs. Dody Wood
#9 – Rick Rypien vs. Brandon Prust
#8 – Scott Walker vs. Scott Daniels
#7 – Alek Stojanov vs. Kelly Chase
#6 – Ron Delorme vs. Jamie Macoun

What would you rank this fight out of 10, Canucks fans? Let us know in the comments below!