The Flyers–Senators brawl was a National Hockey League (NHL) regular season game between the Philadelphia Flyers and the Ottawa Senators that resulted in a league record for penalty minutes. The game was played on March 5, 2004, at the Wachovia Center, the home arena of the Flyers. Philadelphia won the game by the score 5–3. In all, 419 minutes were assessed, passing the previous NHL record of 406. The 213 minutes assessed against Philadelphia was also a record, as was the number of penalty minutes in the third period. The events were precipitated by an incident in the previous meeting between the two teams, when Ottawa's Martin Havlat had swung his stick at Mark Recchi's head. Just under two minutes before the end of the game, enforcers Donald Brashear of the Flyers and Rob Ray of the Senators engaged in a fight. As they skated off to the penalty box, Brashear became involved in another scrap, and the rest of the players on the ice for each team, including goaltenders Robert Esche and Patrick Lalime, began to fight. On both of the next two face-offs to restart the game, further fights occurred. The first of these angered the Flyers management, who believed that the fights were deliberately unbalanced against their players. On the third restart after the initial fight, the crowd booed when a fight did not immediately ensue, but in less than 30 seconds, two more fights had broken out. The final fight occurred directly after the fourth face-off, involving Jason Spezza and Patrick Sharp. Spezza and Brashear were assessed for the most penalty minutes in the game, receiving 35 and 34, respectively. At the start of the 2005–06 season, the NHL introduced a rule that punished anyone instigating a fight in the final five minutes of a game with a one-game suspension, in order to prevent similar incidents occurring in the future. Background In each of the previous two seasons, the Philadelphia Flyers and the Ottawa Senators had met in the Stanley Cup playoffs, and the Senators had eliminated the Flyers both times – in five games in the 2002 Eastern Conference Quarterfinals, and in six games in the 2003 Eastern Conference Semifinals. The Flyers had not beaten the Senators in their previous five regular-season contests, going . When the two sides met in late-February, a week before the brawl game, during the third period, Flyers winger Mark