Former Pittsburgh Penguin and current Minnesota Wild forward Matt Cooke, who has been fined or suspended 10 times in his career, has been docked numerous times for his actions on the ice. The NHL has increased its efforts to improve player safety over the past 15 years.

NEW YORK — A decade or two ago, the standard line from NHL coaches and general managers after one of their players took a dirty hit was: “We’re sending the tape to the league.” They would pull a VHS tape out of the VCR and snail-mail it to league headquarters.

When Damian Echevarrieta came to work for the NHL in 1999, there was no Department of Player Safety. Echevarrieta helped set up a room with various televisions. Games were recorded on VHS, so staffers had to wait until games ended to review an incident. That tape would then be forwarded from New York to the NHL’s Toronto office for Colin Campbell to view, often times by using a flight attendant working a trip there as a courier.

“My first year, we rigged a satellite dish in a corner conference room pointing out the window of the 46th floor and ran wires through the ceiling to our makeshift video room,” said Echevarrieta, now the NHL’s Vice President of Player Safety and Hockey Operations. “One night we lost the signal on all games. I run down and find the cleaning woman dusting the blinds who had let the blinds down and blocked the dish.

“The cleaning lady shut down the NHL for 10 minutes.”

Today, the Department of Player Safety “war room” is on the 12th floor of the Manhattan building that contains the NHL’s offices. The room is not the same as the league’s Situation Room in Toronto, where every goal is reviewed. In New York, every second of every game is watched, but the purpose is to log anything notable — from accidental collisions, to clean checks, to incidents that might require supplemental discipline and much more. They even monitor whether broadcasters are getting rules right or wrong and beat-writer Twitter accounts to ensure incidents are correctly reported to fans.

The Player Safety room has 12 high-definition TVs and workstations that include 10 monitors that show the home and road feeds for every game. Stephane Quintal, in his fifth month as Brendan Shanahan’s replacement as senior VP of player safety, runs a department made up of Echevarrieta, Director of Player Safety Patrick Burke, manager Evan Rand and coordinators Paul Treyman, Chris Nastro, Peter Livera and Michael Grover. They are assigned usually one game each a night to log everything on a laptop.

Based in St. Louis, 2000 league MVP Chris Pronger now works in the department. Hall of Famer Pat LaFontaine advises in an unofficial capacity, and Quintal is looking to hire more ex-players.

Tacked to the walls are depth charts for all 30 teams, lists of repeat offenders (if you’re suspended twice in 18 months, your lost salary is per game, not per day) and lists of prior incidents (suspensions or not) that can be used for quick reference

The Wild’s Matt Cooke, fined or suspended 10 times, is famous in that room. Even the Wild’s Zach Parise is on the wall for his game misconduct for cross-checking Anaheim’s Ryan Kesler on Oct. 17. If Parise gets another stick-related game misconduct within 41 games, he is automatically suspended one game.

One Night in New York

Nov. 9 was a pretty mundane night in the room. Not a single incident in five games rose up the supplemental discipline pole. The department, after no suspension in the season’s first 18 days, was just coming off a stretch of seven suspensions totaling 22 games in 10 days.

The men working the games are like passionate fans at a sports bar, minus the beers.