To be crystal clear, there is no deadline after nine games for the Wild to decide whether to keep Joel Eriksson Ek or return him to his professional team, Farjestad in Sweden.
The Wild can make that determination until the Feb. 15 Swedish Elite League roster deadline. And if there comes a point where the Wild feels the 19-year-old rookie needs a breather, it can temporarily assign him to Iowa of the American Hockey League or Sweden’s junior national team, which Eriksson Ek would almost surely captain at the world championships.
The threshold merely means that if Eriksson Ek plays in a 10th game, his three-year contract becomes two. As General Manager Chuck Fletcher showed when he returned defenseman Matt Dumba to his junior team 2013-14 after Dumba played 13 NHL games, he couldn’t care less.
“Burning a year of the contract means very little,” Fletcher said. “I don’t think it hurts the team, and I don’t really think it helps the player, or vice versa. I don’t care about the 10 games. If it takes us 20 or 30 games to figure it out, so be it.”
At 40 games, a year of Eriksson Ek’s seven-year free agency clock ticks away.
“Once you cross that threshold, you have to feel pretty comfortable you’re doing the right thing by keeping him in the NHL,” Fletcher said. “He’s helping our team short-term, especially with our injuries, but we just have to make sure we’re doing the right thing for him long-term. As long as those two are somewhat aligned, what’s the rush?”
