In hockey, as in life, the game of what if’s can go just about any direction possible.
By now the story about the end of Jordan Staal’s stint with the Penguins is fairly famous since it gets repeated just about nightly on national hockey telecasts. Which, hey, why not, since it is such a colorful story to tell. News that the Pens traded Staal to Carolina broke on his wedding night in the summer of 2012, while he was surrounded by many teammates in what understandably had to be a crazy and surreal scene. What is often left out of the story for brevity before moving onto other subjects is that Staal decided to reject a 10-year contract offer from Pittsburgh earlier that week and would have been an unrestricted free agent in 2013, so it wasn’t like a major trade on NHL draft night was a true bolt out of nowhere, it just happened to have bad timing since it was when his wedding was scheduled. (Interestingly enough, Staal would soon sign a 10-year contract once traded to the Hurricanes with a $6.0 million cap hit, the exact offer that was on the table from the Pens).
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So, in that sense, what was done was about the only result that could have happened, pragmatically-speaking. Pittsburgh made their best shot to keep Staal, and at the time he felt it in his best interests to decline. The only real ‘what if’ has to start based around changing Staal’s answer in the first place.
Which leads to the great hypothetical: what if Staal would have signed with the Penguins in 2012?
The first issue to confront and address would be the NHL’s salary cap in 2013-14, when the new contract would have kicked in. It was set at $64.3 million. Adding Staal at a $6 million cap would have been 9.3% of the salary cap, which to put into today’s dollars on a $104 million cap would be the equivalent of a $10.1 million cap hit.
Add Staal to Crosby and Malkin (each at 13.5% of the cap, $8.7m hits, with Malkin increasing to $9.5m in 2014-15) plus Marc-Andre Fleury and Paul Martin’s matching $5m hits would have taken up 52% of the total space in 2013-14 for just those five players. A massive problem in the latter part of the Ray Shero era was finding enough talent to create a quality team around their star players, retaining Staal would have compounded that issue even further, likely to negative results for the club’s overall success in that 2013-18 range (did anything good end up happening then for the Pens?).
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Had Staal stayed, the shape of the Penguins would have had to morph drastically as a result. That might start with Chris Kunitz, Pittsburgh had Kunitz re-sign in 2013 for a $3.85 million cap hit for 2014-15 (at the time the Malkin+Letang increases kicked in). Jam Staal into the Pens’ structure and that would have made for a sticky situation to keep Kunitz. A $3.85 million contract might not sound like a lot from the 2026 perspective, but back then that was 5.6% of the cap, comparable to $5.8 million in today’s cap dollars. (And, let’s not forget both Crosby+Malkin would be at $13.5m each in today’s dollars. Throw Staal’s $10 in there and suddenly we can understand the math isn’t adding up for someone like Kunitz).
Going down that rabbit hole, beyond just someone like Kunitz – the possibility can’t be dismissed that Pittsburgh keeping Staal would directly tie to having to shed one of Malkin or Kris Letang in the 2013 or 2014 range prior to their next contracts in 2014-15. Letang’s 10.5% of the cap contract in 2014-15 is almost an $11 million contract in 2026-27 dollars. At some point it was fated to become an inevitability that the core of high picks of Fleury-Malkin-Crosby-Staal couldn’t be retained indefinitely in those early days of a restrictive salary cap once they got into their high-earning days. The way the timing and contract lengths worked out it ended up being be Staal as the first to go due to his unrestricted free agency coming up the soonest.
There’s more possibilities for change in every area you look. Staal staying with the Pens could have altered whether or not the Pens acquired Brendan Morrow the following spring in 2013. That proved significant since of the pick Dallas sent to Pittsburgh ended up being used on Jake Guentzel, and Pittsburgh wouldn’t have been in position to select Guentzel without having that pick. Therefore, it’s conceivable that keeping Staal could have changed the course of the franchise in ways both obvious and under the surface. Changing any one decision can have a cascading effect down the line for everything else that is to come in ways large and small. That’s deep into the butterfly flapping its wings causing a tornado on the other side of the continent, but the direct line can be traced just the same.
The other glaring result without requiring a deep dive is that Brian Dumoulin and Nick Bonino were added to the organization via the Staal trade (Dumoulin coming directly from Carolina, Bonino traded for Brandon Sutter, a piece Pittsburgh got for Staal) and those two were instrumental in the 2016 and 2017 Stanley Cups. Dropping Staal meant increasing the team’s depth, eventually leading to success. It’s possible there’s a path that includes keeping Staal leads to championships in the mid-2010’s, but it would be difficult to do the same or better than how the reality played out – with the Staal trade leaving no small lasting effect on the Pens.
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In the end, without the benefit of viewing a parallel universe to see how it all played out under slightly different circumstances, we ultimately couldn’t say for sure what would have happened if Jordan Staal agreed to a contract with the Penguins. Maybe the Pens don’t have Malkin and never drafted Guentzel. It also doesn’t have to be negative, maybe the Pens would have traded for some excellent players that we can’t even fathom now because their focus was changed. Literally any potential scenario is possible once getting into that realm, without any one clear path.
Regardless of exactly how the Pens with Staal post-2012 would have panned out, it is indisputable that a large number of team construction decisions would have been different to make it all work with the salary cap. Without going too off the rails, we can take comfort that fate generally worked out the best for all parties- especially now that Staal has seen his 14 years in Carolina pay off by helping get them within reach of a Stanley Cup. In the end, Staal’s choice not to sign with the Pens and Pittsburgh’s use of the resources they got from him helped to bring two more Stanley Cups to Western Pennsylvania, while also sending out what would have been a very successful and popular player away from the team that drafted him, allowing him to get onto his next chapter that’s still being written.
But we can always stop to wonder how it might have gone if that decision was different..
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