Yes, but like I said in my first post we can't know for sure that what you are calling visible lack of effort is really from lack of effort or due to other reasons like injury or conditioning.
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Eric leads this team in TOI as a forward every year. You can say he could have very easily taken a stride to break up that pass, but he also could have been completely gassed because it was the end of a double shift.
Again, there are times when we should really give players that benefit of the doubt. And there are times when every player gets caught trying to save energy and ends up looking bad ("controller disconnected").
With Eric, it's become both habitual and flagrant. The guy is killing this team on a regular basis by floating around and swinging his stick carelessly at opponents when he could take literally 1 or 2 strides and change the whole dynamic.
If you want to talk about it in more objective terms, how about the fact that he had 12 tripping penalties when
the next-worst player in the league had 8? Or the fact that he had the third-most penalties of any forward in the league when you exclude roughing calls? That's distinctly symptomatic of a player who's not mentally engaged with the game -- and it's not even like Alex Semin, who gets a lot of penalties in the offensive zone because he forechecks aggressively. Staal simply gets nailed with penalties because he cheats on defense.
Or, do a CTRL+F on the word "Eric" in each page of the Subjective +/- thread. There are 25 minuses to choose from, and a good portion of them are cringe-worthy cases of Eric being the main reason that a key goal was scored against us. The games on 10/13, 10/24, 10/25, 11/1, 12/12, 2/8, 3/2, 3/7, 3/15, and 3/25 all involved one
or more critical goals being scored against us not because Eric was physically incapable of making a defensive play, but because he failed to position himself correctly and make a simple stride or stick-lift that was easily within his reach. That's basic defense for an NHL center -- I'm not even picking on things like lost faceoffs, or being part of a general defensive breakdown.
Put the penalties, the flagrant lack of defensive effort, and his offensive underperformance together... how many points in the standings did it cost us this year? 5? 10? We only needed 10 to make the playoffs... did Eric REALLY want to make the playoffs or did he just want to make the playoffs?