There wasn’t a more visible player on the ice at Penguins development camp 2026 than former fifth round pick Zam Plante. Plante finished sixth in the NCAA in scoring last season – finishing on the stat sheet around the same production as first round picks like Gavin McKenna, Porter Martone and Michael Hage. Plante showed off his skills last week in Pittsburgh where along with Piere Mbuyi, he practically toyed with their opponents in a 3v3 tournament with frequency.
From Penguins.com:
Zam Plante, captain of Team Rutherford, was MVP of the day.
“I thought he stood out probably more than anyone today, with just his creativity, his hockey sense,” said Tom Kostopoulos, Penguins Director of Player Development. “And then he can finish, he can make plays.”
Kostopoulos then offered this fun tidbit about the 2022 fifth-round pick, who had 20 goals and 51 points in 40 games last season with Minnesota-Duluth while playing with his younger brother Max, who won the Hobey Baker Award:
“One of the interesting and cool things about development camp is we get to know these kids off the ice too, so we put them in little competitions all throughout the week. He won the cornhole tournament. We’re at a bowling alley, he won’t sit down from the bowling. We do trivia, he’s all over the answers. Seems like anything we play, he’s involved in, and guys gravitate to him, and he just seems to like competing and winning.”
Plante had some real chemistry with 2026 fourth-round pick Pierce Mbyugi, as they connected on several plays. “Yeah, he’s a little sniper. He’s fun to play with,” Plante said.
The Penguins have to hope that all this team building pays off with creating interest in the future, because they have one major RED flag when it comes to Plante. That’s literal in the form of the Red Wings, who have drafted the other two Plante brothers in recent years – Max was drafted 47th in 2024, youngest brother Victor got picked up by Detroit with the 47th pick in 2026.
They’re already openly floating that all Zam has to do is “be patient” and “graduate college and then he will be a free agent” and “maybe” he would be able to join the other two brothers in the Detroit organization.
That could be nothing more than yucking it up by a brother sharing some daydreams, though it did seem more like a fully-formed thought rather than one totally out of the blue, so who knows how serious that may or may not be in the future. It’s certainly not a new practice for NCAA players to avoid signing with the team that drafted them, graduate, and pick their own NHL team in free agency. That path has been tread numerous times, including by soon-to-be-former Penguin prospect Cruz Lucius and for a lot less obvious reasons than keeping a pipeline together for three brothers. All three Plante boys will play at Duluth next season for the first time, Victor enrolling as a freshman, Zam and Max being juniors that are both rising juniors. The Zam+Max connection resulted in Max earning the Hobey Baker trophy last season as the top collegiate player.
There’s nothing the Penguins can do about those dynamics at this point. 2026-27 will tell us a lot about Plante’s future plans; if he doesn’t want to sign with Pittsburgh next March when his college season ends and indicates plans return to Duluth for his senior year in 2027-28 the writing will be on the wall for heading towards the UFA route for the summer of 2028 and an unfavorable outcome for the Pens.
Perhaps worse, Detroit will have little incentive or obligation to make a trade for Zam if they know he’s going to join them and them alone as a free agent in 2028. The only thing the Red Wings would gain by making a trade is getting the ability to have possibly both brothers turn pro a season earlier than by going the FA route that will require graduation. The Penguins only invested a fifth round pick in their player, they’d be lucky to recoup even that much – which would be unfulfilling since most fifth round picks don’t score 50 points as an NCAA sophomore. In that sense, there’s not much benefit in not being able to redeem a winning lottery ticket for anything else but another low-level one. The bigger pay off for the Pens would be to bring such a player into their organization, which they may or may not be able to do.
To that end, the Pens will have to hope what they can offer Zam would be more enticing than joining his brothers. Pittsburgh should be prepared to sign Plante to an NHL contract that burns the first year in 2026-27, including getting in the lineup for regular season games in the NHL down the stretch (ala the carrot used to sign free agent Jake Livanavage last season). That opportunity would be difficult to turn down for any hockey player, regardless of the pangs of familial connections to step right into the NHL and start early at age-22 instead of waiting to go pro in 2028-29 after his 24th birthday.
Plante has been a summer star for Pittsburgh, but it’s worth wondering if it will result in him signing a contract and getting to play for the organization beyond development camps. If he’s willing to join the Pens’ organization, it’s a no-brainer to add a talented youngster that appears to have a bright future.
