Skip navigation
Favorites
Sign up to follow your favorites on all your devices.
Sign up

Don’t expect Penguins to suspend Cooke

Image (1) Cooke-thumb-200x300-6811.jpg for post 213
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter Dave Molinari has a pretty interesting Q&A up today, in which a reader suggests that perhaps the Penguins should suspend Matt Cooke if the NHL doesn’t. Here’s his response:

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.

It seems that we should have a ruling sometime today on whether the NHL suspends Cooke, but it seems that right now the indications are that he won’t. If the NHL did not suspend Mike Richards -- as they should have -- then I doubt they’ll do the same for Cooke. Of course, Cooke is the mythical “repeat offender” that the league likes to bring the hammer down on.

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.