It's not at all inconsistent if those things were communicated to the players beforehand, during, and afterward. If I'm coaching a player who needs work on not turning the puck over, and I know that the player best responds to playing time restrictions, I might tell that player that if he's being cavalier with the puck, he's going to sit the bench. If there are other players whose problem is that they don't take enough risks or that they're not moving the puck the way I'd like to see, I'm not going to punish them for turning the puck over since they're taking the risks I asked them to take. Or perhaps I know that these other players respond poorly to playing time restrictions and do better with hard practice drills, or private conversations, or whatever - you tailor the accountability to the player's situation.You're drawing a pretty fine semantic line between "different standard" and "double standard." PV said they didn't want to sit guys because they didn't want to lose them, so....? Were Z's turnovers more egregious than anything else we saw? Was he the only guy to take a misconduct for barking at the refs? Cronin was ejected for f***'s sake.
It's blatantly inconsistent. Maybe communication takes the sting out of it and it doesn't matter, as you say.
Yeah you mentioned you were a coach.
That's not inconsistent. That's coaching. There are some rules that are across the board - don't be late to practice, don't disrespect your teammates or the officials, etc. Then there are some that are fitted to each player. And if a player came to ask me, as the coach, why did he get punished this way for this transgression while that guy didn't, I would explain it. And if the answer didn't work for the player, we'd discuss it until we came to a plan that we agreed on. All of that is behind the scenes. Is it possible that Cronin is not doing any of those things or is doing those things poorly? Sure, but I don't know why we'd assume that at this point.
And a coach being ejected is far different from a player - as a coach, I tell my players that they need to let me do the talking to the officials. There is a different rapport there and a different power dynamic. (Edit: I recognize this is different in the NHL where you have captains who are authorized to talk to the officials, but the general point remains.) And there come times, rarely, when as a coach the best thing I can do for my players is to let them know that I have their backs by getting into it with an official over a bad call. I've never been ejected as a coach, although I've gotten close, and I've had to make the calculation as to whether the benefit (the players getting fired up) is worth the cost (me not being around to manage the team). I don't think there's ever a good time for a player to get ejected; that just puts the team shorthanded.