The troubling thing about Matt Cooke is not that he didn’t change. It’s that he did. He worked hard to clean up his act. He made significant progress.

He feared if he screwed up again, the NHL would hit him hard. He knew his rehabilitation would never end. “It’s a work in progress,” he once said. “It never stops. … It’s not like I can just go back.”

Yet here he is back again – back to throwing a dirty hit, back to injuring an opponent, back to hurting his own team. The Minnesota Wild forward received a seven-game suspension for kneeing Colorado Avalanche defenseman Tyson Barrie on Monday night in Game 3 of a first-round playoff series.



[Related: NHL explains Matt Cooke's 7-game suspension for kneeing Avs' Tyson Barrie]





I am all for stiffer suspensions. I have been for a long time. But they have to be for the right reasons, and both the NHL and the NHL Players’ Association have to get on board and give the department of player safety the mandate.

It’s too easy to say seven games was or wasn’t enough based on some arbitrary, personal standard of justice for Cooke, who has received supplemental discipline 10 times in his 15-season NHL career – four fines and six suspensions – and just sidelined Barrie for 4-to-6 weeks with an MCL injury.

We need to take a deeper look and ask real questions. Supplemental discipline is not supposed to be about satisfaction. It’s supposed to be about changing behavior, and it seemed to be working in Cooke’s case.



[More: The good, bad & ugly of Matt Cooke]





So why did Cooke slip up? Because it was a matter of time for him? Because he got complacent? Will this seven-game suspension scare him straight again, or will it ease his fear of punishment and lead to yet another incident?

This is a relatively stiff suspension for several reasons:

— A player with no history of supplemental discipline who committed the same act and caused the same injury probably would have received three or four games.

— It is the second-longest suspension for kneeing in NHL history and the longest in more than 16 years. Defenseman Bryan Marchment, who was notorious for kneeing, received an eight-gamer in February 1998. The suspension was his second for kneeing that season.

— Though the NHL comes down harder on repeat offenders, it comes down hardest on those who repeat specific acts. Cooke’s biggest problem has been head shots. He does have a history of kneeing, including borderline incidents recently, so this is part of a pattern. But he has never been suspended for kneeing before.

— This is the playoffs. There is no magic formula for weighing playoff games versus regular-season games, but the dynamic is different. Cooke is not missing seven games out of an 82-game regular season. He started his suspension with the Wild trailing the Avs in the series, 2-1.

— Finally, Cooke had not been fined or suspended since March 2011.

Cooke was playing for the Pittsburgh Penguins then. He threw an elbow into the head of the New York Rangers’ Ryan McDonagh – at a time when concussion awareness was increasing, his owner had been vocal about violence in the game and general managers were supporting stiff suspensions for repeat offenders.

Colin Campbell, the NHL disciplinarian at the time, suspended Cooke for the Penguins’ final 10 regular-season games and the first round of the playoffs. The Penguins were already without Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin because of injuries, and now they were without a key component of the league’s top penalty-killing unit. They lost to the Tampa Bay Lightning.



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The league made it clear to Cooke that his next punishment would be more severe, and the Penguins made it clear he was on thin ice with them, too. He flew to New York to meet with Campbell’s successor, Brendan Shanahan, and kept in touch with him early in the 2011-12 season. Shanahan sent him videos. The Penguins showed him videos, too.

Cooke relearned his approach to the game – “out of necessity and circumstance,” as Penguins coach Dan Bylsma once said. He relearned how to evaluate plays so he could avoid dangerous situations. He stopped looking for kill shots. He was less reckless.

From 2008-09 through 2010-11, Cooke had racked up 336 penalty minutes in 222 regular-season games, an average of 1.51 penalty minutes per game. He had two non-fighting majors and seven misconducts. (He also had one misconduct in the playoffs.)

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