Carter vs. Salmela

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf4BoCP26rM&feature=player_embedded

This hockey moment raises interesting questions about hockey and the world. I have watched this film over and over and think the hit was legal, within the rules of the game. This brings us to the next question: Is legality enough? I think what the bankers, loan officers and ratings managers did over the last years was legal as well. But is it enough?
It is impossible, of course, to legislate a spirit of a game; that is where sportsmanship starts and that can be nebulous and dangerous. So, too, a culture; that area is morality. But there must be some consideration for analysis of behavior outside of the strictly legal. Legality should be the floor of behavior, not its ceiling. I have no good answer for that unwritten area. Make better people? After all, the hockey culture used to enforce "sportsmanship" with fists. And Salmela, unconscious before he hit the ice and with retrograde amnesia, made so little fuss he did not go to a hospital (where a traumatic unconscious/amnesia diagnosis might have put in in an ICU bed for a night). That type of culture is very forgiving.
Yet the hit was vicious, delivered against a player after the play was officially over by a man who knew it was unexpected and dangerous. Here the legality has no social function other than protect the perpetrator who should, in a civilized society, be last in the queue for protection.
Such a system, as the sage said of prostitution, is "technically perfect".