Pens win again 2-1

Pens win another hard fought battle today 2-1, giving them a 5 point lead in the Atlantic Divsion over the New Jersey Devils though the Devils have 3 games in hand including tonights game against Edmonton. Pascal Dupuis scored again, and Evgeni Malkin nets the game winning goal......Lost in this triumph is the controversy over the Matt Cooke on Marc Savard hit. It was a high hit, with either the shoulder or elbow to Savards head, knocking Savard out for a few seconds and leaving him concussed. Nobody in my section seemed to see the hit live, nor did the referees it would seem. Many blogs, including the Empty Netters blog for the Post Gazette call the hit very dirty.............. I really like Matt Cooke, so I may be biased, but the hit looks an awful lot like the one Mike Richards put on David Booth back in October. It was a high hit, at warp speed resulting in an injury to a great player for the opposition in both situations. I thought the Richards hit was borderline and I think the Cooke hit is borderline............neither was necessary, but neither was outside the confines of the rules as they currently stand. Cooke has some history, so I expect him to get 5-6 games for the hit, though I am not totally sure what is right here.....the league has boxed itself in by allowing guys like Alexander Ovechkin who specialize in knee on knee hits and boarding to essentially get away with murder, while hitting lesser players pretty hard but in a very inconsistent manner. If you want to rid the league of these high hits, then you have to make these plays finable and suspendable no doubt. I think there should be some objective rules though to make the findings fair. Only Mike Richards and Matt Cooke know if they intended to hit the opposing player high or specifically in the head.......and I would think that neither did.........but where is that line in a game where you want the opposition to be a little hesitant to skate freely into your zone (like a free safety hammering a reciever over the middle), and initmidation and high speed collisions are expected? Do you just make any hit above the shoulders an automatic 2 game suspension with some ala carte add ons for aggravated circumstances, such as the use of an elbow, the amount of time post puck possession in which the hit occurs, the record of the offender, etc.? The video replays are not great, and I would like to give Cooke the benefit of the doubt, but I am not SURE if I can......if you click on the above link and watch the last part of the video where it is slow motion it appears to me as if Cooke does keep the elbow in and Savards head is low, but he could have pulled back on the hit.....only he knows what he really did..........at the end of the day, I hope Marc Savard is okay, and I am confident that the NHL will get its decision wrong in some manner.............