The Pittsburgh Penguins' Jordan Staal sat out last Tuesday's game against the Florida Panthers after playing fewer than eight minutes in their previous outing against the Montreal Canadiens, a mostly understandable development for the only player from the draft class of 2006, apart from the Boston Bruins' Phil Kessel, to jump directly from junior to the National Hockey League.
With very few exceptions — and Staal's teammate with the Penguins, Sidney Crosby, is the most prominent recent one — this is the normal developmental pattern for teenage hockey players. By the start of the third month, the pace and the standard of play tend to ramp up across the board in the NHL.
In addition, some of the hunger and passion that they displayed in training camp and early on, as they get an unexpected taste of life in the NHL, tend to fade and now that it's becoming just another day at the office.
Even Staal acknowledged that turn of events to a Pittsburgh newspaper, saying: "I'm not playing very well. It's just a matter of showing some character and battling through it."
The larger issue, for the Penguins, is what to do with Staal once the calendar clicks over to January. As soon as Staal played his 11th NHL game back in October, the Penguins burned a year off his entry-level contract. That was an important decision-day in terms of his long-term future in the organization.
Another is approaching soon that would at least make the Penguins consider sending Staal back to junior before he plays his 40th game. It is clause 10.1 (a) under the new collective bargaining agreement, which relates to when he might qualify for unrestricted free agency down the road. Under the aforementioned provision, the players' biggest win in the last labor negotiations, Staal would become a free agent, either when he turns 27 year (and since he was born on Sept. 10, 1988, that would happen on July 1, 2016, or as soon as he accrues seven NHL seasons.
This is where it gets tricky — and interesting.
By definition, an accrued season means any year in which a player was on a club's active roster for 40 or more regular-season games. So here, essentially is the Penguins dilemma, and one they'll need to address by the first week of January:
If Staal's production and ice time continue to fall off, do they send him back to his junior team after his 39th game and thus push back by 12 months the year in which he potentially becomes an unrestricted free agent? Or keep him on the team for the duration of the season anyway and forget about the possible contract implications sometime in the next decade.
In a perfect world, an organization would prefer to stagger contract negotiations with their major stars, so they don't all come up for negotiation in the same summer. The way things stand right now, the Penguins have three important building blocks in place up front: Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Staal.
Because Crosby is in his second season already, he'll get to seven accrued seasons by the end of the 2012 season. Malkin's commitment to Pittsburgh will be up by 2013 and in theory, if Staal sticks around this year, he'll be qualify for unrestricted free agency in the same year as the Penguins' young Russian star. If Staal were to return to junior after his 39th game, then for purposes of unrestricted free agency, he wouldn't complete his seventh accrued season until 2014, a year after Malkin.
It's complicated, but the bottom line is, if Staal isn't on the Penguins roster for 40 games this season, he will not qualify for unrestricted free agency at the age of 25, which is when it will occur if he stays past that point.
So what to do?
The vast majority of general managers probably wouldn't worry about the consequences of such a decision because the vast majority of general managers are trying to preserve their jobs this year and next year and maybe after that. It's hard to worry about a contract negotiation in 2014 because, unless you're winning — and winning soon — that'll be somebody else's headache anyway.
