In general, though, it probably isn’t realistic to expect an organization to punish a player for something that happens on the ice if the league doesn’t seem his action worthy of a fine or suspension. If a guy does something that his coach or GM deems to be seriously out of line during a game, he might be on the receiving end of a one-sided discussion about it, but the primary objective of team officials is to win games, and that means dressing the 20 players they believe are most likely to make that happen.
But I tend to agree with Molinari here. As much as I would love to see a team take the bull by the horns and suspend the player themselves, there’s no way that is going to happen, especially if the league rules the hit was legal. There’s no doubt that Cooke embarrassed the league, himself and his team with an insanely dangerous and careless hit.
But the ones that should be apologizing is the NHL for not already having rules in place to prevent these sorts of hits. Supposedly the NHL has been discussing the legality of shoulder hits to the head for over ten years, and yet just now it looks like steps are going to be made to standardize the punishments for these hits and actually deem these hits illegal -- completely.
Matt Cooke is not without fault here, no matter what the NHL says is legal. He made a dangerous hit on a vulnerable player and although Joffrey Lupol is worried hockey will no longer be a man’s game, what we don’t want are our superstars walking around like brain dead zombies.