Calgary faced a somewhat similar choice last year - do you send Monahan back to junior, where he already dominated, or keep him up with the big club? Again, Calgary had all kinds of people telling them not to "burn" a year of Monahan's ELC, but they looked at it this way - the kid had learned all he could in junior, and was only going to develop bad habits by going back there. It sounds weird, but when forward play 25-27 minutes a night, they actually develop bad habits, playing lazy and cutting corners in order to save themselves physically. And let's be clear - if you're a junior coach with a stud 19 year old in your lineup and you need to win games, you are riding him like a rented mule.
Lazar will likely be in the exact same boat, especially when you consider how good the kid looked at our 2013 camp as a fuzzy cheeked 18 year old. Unless Lazar comes into camp 20 pounds overweight and stinks the place up, I would argue that you would be hurting his development by sending him back to junior. He has done all he can do at that level, and you are simply going to waste a year of the kid's development by sending him there. No question he has to earn the spot, but if in fact Curtis Lazar is one of our 12 best forwards coming out of camp, I think it is self defeating to send him back to junior and slot in some scrub like Chuck Kobasew. (Wow, there's a blast from the past name.) Again, we aren't a cap team, so it doesn't cripple us to have him coming off his ELC a year sooner. We still control his rights at that time, and could sign him to a pretty cap friendly bridge deal.
