Paul Zeise: Time to legislate players such as Tom Sestito out of the NHL

Pittsburgh Penguins goon Tom Sestito was suspended four games for his cowardly late hit on Winnipeg’s Toby Enstrom Wednesday night.

That’s unfortunate. If the NHL had any clue, Sestito would have been suspended for the rest of the season.

And I’d go one step further: The NHL should have fined the Penguins for calling up Sestito and putting him on the ice in the first place.

That would send a clear message to the rest of the NHL that the days of putting goons on the ice to settle scores are over.

The previous game between the teams got chippy. Evgeni Malkin elbowed Blake Wheeler in the head, and the Penguins lost defensemen Justin Schultz and Olli Maatta to injuries. That means both teams were on alert for the rematch.

But all three of those hits were within the context of hockey, and only Malkin’s was over-the-line dirty.

Malkin should have been suspended for a game or two. The league claims it wants to legislate head hits and make it safer, and that was a textbook case of a player headhunting.

He wasn’t suspended, though, and that angered the Jets. Of course, the Penguins felt they needed Sestito just in case something went down.

Thankfully, the Sestitos of the world are becoming few and far between, but the fact that they still exist in 2017 is ridiculous.

And the fact that the Penguins went down this road and Mike Sullivan tried to justify it is even more ridiculous.

“Tommy’s intent isn’t to injure,” Sullivan said. “He plays the game hard and brings a physical element to our team.”

No, Ian Cole plays the game hard and brings a physical element to the Penguins. But he actually has skill and a role in helping the Penguins win games.

Chris Kunitz leads the team in hits and has become a physical player. He also has a skill that helps the Penguins win.

Sestito’s job is to try and hurt people. His main talent is throwing punches at another player’s face. I don’t know about you, but the last time I threw a punch at someone, my goal wasn’t to avoid injuring them.

The Penguins should be ashamed of themselves for even having Sestito in the organization. It is ridiculous they call him up to play on the same team with some of the most skilled players on the planet.

He did his job, though, as he was on the ice for 1:02 and had three penalties and 20 penalty minutes and knocked someone out of the game.

Oh, wait, his plus/minus was also plus-1, so he apparently did contribute to the win.

This old-school hockey mentality is slowly but surely going away but still exists in far too many circles.

And adding a player like Sestito into the mix won’t make the game safer for the Penguins stars. The opposite is actually true, because both teams understand that he isn’t in uniform to give out Swedish massages.

The final 6 minutes of the game turned ugly, and Winnipeg’s Adam Lowry was given a 10-minute misconduct for taking a run at Malkin.

Malkin himself got into a fight with Wheeler early. What if Malkin had broken his hand in that fight or worse, sustained a concussion and was out for two months?

The sad part of all of this is the Penguins are one of the teams that has led the NHL out of the dark ages by proving that talent, speed and skill trumps heavy and physical almost every time. More teams are searching for players with speed, and less are searching for big, physical plodding players who muck the game up.

As a result, the NHL is a far better product today than it was even five or six years ago, as more and more teams have tried to replicate what teams such as the Penguins, Blackhawks and Lightning have done.

There is much less fighting in hockey, and that’s a good thing. Hockey doesn’t need fights to be entertaining, and it is a much better game without them.

The sport is physical by nature, but being physical and being a goon are not the same thing. It is time for the NHL to make the status of goons go from “rare” to “extinct.”