Tuesday was the deadline for teams to sign certain prospects of theirs -- primarily junior players drafted in 2019 or European players drafted in 2017 -- or their signing rights to those players would expire at 5 p.m.
The only Penguins prospect to which this applied was Finnish defenseman Antti Palojarvi, the Penguins' sixth-round pick in 2017.
The 5 p.m. deadline came and went with Palojarvi unsigned. The Penguins have relinquished those signing rights to Palojarvi, he is no longer a Penguins prospect.
Palojarvi, 22, was never able to stick in Finland's top league, Liiga. He made his Liiga debut in the 2018-19 season and played 16 games with the club Lukko. He only played five games with Lukko in the 2019-20 season, and spent the rest of his time split between the junior league and second-tier professional league, Mestis.
This season Palojarvi didn't play any games in the top league, instead playing 11 games in the junior league and 15 games in the second league.
I last spoke with Palojarvi prior to the 2019-20 season at the last development camp he attended, and he spoke about the desire to add more size in order to stick in the top league. At the time he was 6 foot 2 and 172 pounds, and he's now listed as 187 pounds.
“I want to get more power and be more physical in the games,” he told me at that camp of his goals for the season. “But I think the biggest thing is just to stick in the Elite League and play there.”
With the rights to Palojarvi relinquished, only three of the six members from Wilkes-Barre's 2017 draft class remain in the organization. Second-round pick, defenseman Zachary Lauzon, retired in 2019 without playing a professional game due to lingering concussion issues, and fifth-round pick Linus Olund, a forward, was released from his contract and returned to Sweden after just one season in Wilkes-Barre in 2018-19.
One of the members of the 2017 draft class is defenseman Clayton Phillips, who was selected in the third round and will be a senior at Penn State next season, and thus remains unsigned. The deadline to sign Phillips is Aug. 15, 2022.
The two signed members of the 2017 draft class are forward Jan Drozg, a fifth-round pick who played his second professional season with Wilkes-Barre/Scranton this year, and defenseman Will Reilly, a seventh-round pick who made his debut this season.