From Terry Jones, an Edmonton sports reporter who's been around since 1982, about Puljujarvi...
"When it comes to Puljujarvi, the Oilers’ fourth pick in the draft, the way Chiarelli has handled that has been beyond curious.
Especially considering if he had made this move one game earlier, he wouldn’t have burned an entire year in terms of the time until he becomes an unrestricted free agent.
Unlike his World Juniors linemate, Patrik Laine, who thrived with the Winnipeg Jets until suffering a concussion on the weekend, the kid with the Joker-like giant grin had language problems, was having trouble adapting to the smaller ice surface and had developed confidence problems.
The Oilers clearly wanted to keep him under their care here, including learning the language and to help lessen the homesick factor for the 18-year-old. But in attempting to become a playoff team, the Oilers couldn’t provide him with the soft minutes and power-play time.
Puljujarvi spent 14 games in the press box including Sunday’s game in Ottawa and played just 3:27 in his previous outing in Boston, the game that used up his year toward free agency.
Maybe the idea there was to deliver the message to him that when he goes to the AHL, it’s totally for his development and not for contractual concerns.
Being a European who didn’t play major junior in Canada, Puljujarvi wasn’t as easy to deal with as Leon Draisaitl, who played in Prince Albert.
Draisaitl was shipped to the Kelowna Rockets in junior, where he thrived and went on to become Memorial Cup MVP.
The AHL is a big boy league but unlike the NHL players aren’t always where they are supposed to be. It provides it’s own adjustment problems.
Puljujarvi ended up with one goal and seven assists in his 28 games.
By comparison, Draisaitl played 37 games and had two goals and seven assists when he was sent back to junior. Draisaitl, a third pick overall in the draft, returned last year to have a 19-goal, 51 point season and so far this year has 15 goals and 35-points.
There’s every reason to expect Puljujarvi to return to the Oilers and have similar success."
It does seem odd the decision wasn't made without burning the contract year...and now that I know he was on Laine's line in the World Juniors, I'm less impressed with his stats/history; seems to me he's definitely a "prospect" and not someone who'd actually had significant success before being drafted...again, for me being 59th in Liiga scoring (in 2015-16) is not significantly impressive
Maybe he needed the "wake up call"
IMO it seems to often that in modern hockey players are praised for "talent" without performance + organizations/coaching are often blamed for a player's lack of success/performance, and so maybe in today's game you sometimes need to do things like burn a contract year to get a player to realize they're not as good as they think/they'll need to put some work in
P.S. Edmonton has two daily newspapers...Terry Jones writes for one of them, here's an article on the current Puljujarvi situation from the other
http://www.msn.com/en-ca/sports/nhl/fro ... ailsignout
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+ they lost one rookie contract year also.
I even rated him as that, that year. 
But yeah, too early to say of course.
