We at one time saw similar behaviors from Sean Avery, who was not nearly as talented a hockey player as Marchand but was a similar smaller player who liked to agitate opponents and get them off their game. This even extended to comments he made to the media about opposing players. I came to the conclusion that Avery was mentally ill on a certain level but in the case of Marchand, I think he stumbled upon a loophole in the rules on licking and wanted to see how far he could push it. In the end, hockey is a team sport and agitation of individual players does not work as well as it once did. I can remember a time in the late 1970s, probably before some of you were born, when Mike Bossy, a very talented 50 goal a year scorer for the NY Islanders Cup champions of 1980-1983, would regularly be bullied by the Philadelphia Flyers. They would send guys like Dave Schultz out to harass and bully him and it largely worked because Bossy was not a fighter and seemed to abhor violence. So what happened that changed all that is Clark Gillies, who was the toughest player on the Islanders, one game went after Schultz and broke his jaw and after that the Flyers were very hesitant to bully Bossy. That is sort of when everything changed for the Islanders.
Nowadays that kind of thing never happens. And guys like Nick Fotiu, a long time goon with the NY Rangers, don't even make an NHL roster. NHL teams just cannot keep a player on the roster whose only talent is to throw a punch.