Earlier this week the Tigers announced suspensions to four players, including an eight-week ban to youngster Daniel Connors, after the quartet misbehaved following the side's loss to the Sydney Swans.
Ben Cousins, Dean Polo and Luke McGuane will all serve one-match bans this week stemming from the incident and while the latter three were not drunk, Hardwick said it was important the club made a stand.
"It wasn't a tough decision at all," Hardwick said before training on Thursday.
"The harsh thing is when you have 14 new blokes come in you need to set a pretty high standard for those players and we felt the four players went outside those … we felt we acted strongly but we felt we acted accordingly."
Cousins' actions and suspension has been in question after the Brownlow medallist was found to have given Connors - under the influence of alcohol at the time - a black eye after trying to subdue his younger teammate.
Hardwick said he wasn't disappointed by Cousins but felt he and his teammates had the opportunity to "nip it in the bud" before the night escalated to the point it did.
"Awareness is one of the things in our teammates that we look to strive for and we felt that they didn't react quick enough," he said.
"I think all four have let me down. Dan needs to take some responsibility for his actions.
"The other guys tried their best [but] I just don't think they handled the situation well enough though.
"As a group of coaches we have this thing called championship moves where if you can see a mate of yours in trouble you need to take appropriate action to stop that.
"That was the whole thing. If someone actually had the balls to stand up and say 'Listen Dan, enough's enough, go to bed' [then] none of that would have happened, so that was the disappointing thing from our point of view and that's why we suspended them accordingly."
Hardwick confirmed Cousins would play in the VFL this week, while at least two Tigers would debut in Sunday's clash against Melbourne.
