Should Letang Have Been Suspended?

Josh Boulton (@ToughCallBlog)
Apr 20, 2016
2 min read

The Kris Letang slash on Viktor Stalberg finds itself to be the most talked about play of last night's Stanley Cup Playoffs.

This 2015-2016 playoff has been the year of the slash, and the overwhelming majority of them are not called. The Letang slash was no exception, missed by everyone.

Video: SPORTSNETCANADA

Watching the game on tv when it happened, at first glance in live speed it really looked like an accidental consequence of Letang tugging on his stick to try and free it after being tied up with Dominic Moore.

The slow motion close up leaves little doubt this was intentional. While his stick was raised as a result of the regular course of play, it wasn't moving forward on a direct line to Stalberg's face until Letang made it. This was a dirty play that needs to be eliminated.

Letang needs to be suspended, no doubt. But how long is enough, and what's justified? Those are two very different questions. If you take this incident alone for what it is, it's like an 8-10 gamer. Even the most diehard Penguins fan would admit this. If two regular season games equals on playoff game, we'd be looking at potentially the rest of this series and into the next, or if the Penguins lose out, it would essentially be the rest of the playoffs.

But that's talking reason and common sense. We're talking about NHL Player Safety here. This is a department that thought Duncan Keith sitting for 5 meaningless games and one playoff game was going to teach him a lesson.

So while we're saying probably 8-10 games would be enough, the other question of what's justified is another matter. In my opinion, Duncan Keith was probably worst case scenario, AND he'd done it before. Therefore you could kind of say the maximum penalty bar was set at 3 playoff games. Letang has no priors, so that's automatically down to 1-2 playoff games. Because his was less calculated than Keith's, that reduces it even more, bringing us down to 0-1 playoff games.

Add to that an incident from after the final buzzer of game 1 in the Flyers/Caps series. Brayden Schenn hit Karl Alzner just after time expired, and Alzner responded from the ground by one handing an axe chop slash to Schenn's head area, exactly the same way Duncan Keith did. The announcers didn't notice. Nobody on the networks mentioned it. Player Safety didn't address it. Most of you probably never knew that even happened, yet here's the video evidence.