Today as you all know by now Brendan Shanahan suspended Tyler Myers 3 games for the boarding penalty against Scott Gomez. Not surprisingly most of the reaction around here has been pretty strongly against this decision, with many accusing Shanahan of being inconsistent with his punishments. I wanted to look into this a little further by comparing the Myers penalty and suspension with similar ones from this season.

Let's begin by listing some of the major factors Shanahan discussed in his explanation of the Myers suspension:

Myers 2:00 Minor Boarding - 3 games

• Myers has time to avoid or minimize hit, drives head into boards
• 1st time offender
• Caused injury

According to Wikipedia there have been 11 other boarding penalties that incurred supplemental discipline this year, 5 of which earned a suspension:

Pierre-Luc Letourneau-Leblond 2:00 Minor Boarding - 4 preseason, 1 reg season game

• Letrouneau-Leblond has time to avoid or minimize hit
• Repeat offender (1x)
• No mention of injury

Jody Shelley 5:00 Major + Game Boarding - 5 preseason, 5 reg season games

• Shelley has time to avoid or minimize (but he's Jody Shelley, so..)
• Of course he's a repeat offender
• Caused injury

• Has time to avoid or minimize
• Repeat offender (recent fine for similar infraction)
• No injury on the play

• Carcillo is a giant douche
• Repeat offender? Come on.
• Caused injury

• Reckless shove from behind that causes dangerous collision with boards
• 1st time offender
• No apparent injury

The 6 additional boarding penalties that only earned the player a fine do not come with Shana-splanations, unfortunately, so I'm not going to even try to compare those. We are left to assume that Myers's penalty was significantly worse than any of those since they apparently didn't warrant a suspension.

I think the easiest comparables here are the Letang and Ference penalties. Letang was a repeat offender and got 1 fewer game than Myers, but he did not cause an injury and Myers did. Ference got the same number of games as Myers despite not causing an injury and also being a 1st time offender; the only difference in his case was that he was given a major penalty on the ice rather than a minor. Obviously this is way too small a sample size to make any good conclusions, but that also means that you can't really say Shanahan is out to get the Sabres either. People have brought up the high-stick immediately before the boarding to defend Myers, but I honestly think it makes it look worse - it provides the motive for the crime. The fact that he immediately made a beeline for the nearest Hab and crushed him into the boards makes it look like making a hockey play was the furthest thing from Myers's mind at that point. The force and clear intent of the hit combined with the fact that it apparently caused an injury puts 3 games within the realm of consistency in my eyes, but feel free to disagree.