SEATTLE — An old axiom from schoolyards and streets applies equally to NHL rinks: Don't start something you can't finish.

And finishing often involves accepting a challenge to drop your gloves and fight. Dropping gloves is an expected ritual as old as professional hockey itself, especially if a player has laid another one out through a borderline or illegal hit.

"If somebody's been cheap-shotted or hit in the back or something like that and you're the person laying the bad hit, you've got to be ready to throw your gloves off," Kraken forward Jared McCann said. "That's just the way it is."

It's part of the unwritten hockey code — and also the NHL rule book — that gloves come off before punches as the hard padding can elevate damage inflicted. Also, it's seen as accepting the challenge to engage in mutual on-ice combat allowable under NHL rules since 1922; the lone penalty being offsetting five-minute fighting majors.

Still, some buck tradition by refusing to drop gloves and fight. An occasional odd duck will even fake a glove drop to goad an opponent into shedding theirs and earning a two-minute instigator penalty.

The worst transgressors refuse to fight and "turtle" to further sell an instigator penalty — usually dropping to the ice and covering their head in a protective shell-like posture while their gloveless opponent rains down blows. Everybody loves a turtle, except hockey players viewing it among the most cowardly on-ice acts.

"Yeah, it is, big-time," McCann said of "turtling" remaining despised even with hockey fights on the decline. "Especially if you lay a dirty hit, or cheap-shot a guy. You have to answer for it."

Last month, Kraken coach Dave Hakstol was incensed after Calgary Flames forward Martin Pospisil delivered cheap shots on Adam Larsson and Vince Dunn in the same game. Hakstol seemed just as angry postgame about Pospisil refusing to drop his gloves and fight when Tye Kartye sought retribution as he was about the hits themselves.

"You run around like that, you probably need to answer when somebody (Kartye) comes at you man-to-man and that didn't happen," Hakstol told reporters.

Pospisil kept gloves on and adopted a standing-turtle posture of covering up as Kartye swung away. Pospisil being leery of fighting because of past concussions wasn't well received as an excuse by players and pundits pointing out he keeps injuring people with dangerous hits.

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