The Devil’s in the Details

A second deal with the Devils fell through and, now, perhaps as much as a month of hell remains in the National Hockey League’s free-agency period.

Forward Ilya Kovalchuk, who signed an unprecedented 17-year, $102-million deal with the New Jersey Devils on July 20, only to have his dreams of having a contract until he was a brittle, battered, and bruised 44 years old quashed by the league, had his heart broken to a greater extent earlier this month when an arbitrator backed the league’s power play to reject the contract. And just this week the framework of a second potential contract was reportedly denied by the league. As a result, it’s clear that this summer hockey has made way for the always enthralling waiting game. The sad part is, as far as they’ve come in trying to work something out, the two sides have set the league back about a decade.

Clearly the initial contract was a joke, meant to circumvent the cap by front-loading the contract in its early years with salaries of upwards of $11.5 million. The peanuts totalling $550,000 in salary in the contract’s later stages only served to drag down the average salary-cap hit to make it more manageable on a per-year basis for the Devils.

All Kovalchuk would have had to do was make a retirement announcement, met with little more than a nudge and wink between him and the Devils, prior to his senior citizenry kicking in and his contract would have been taken off the books. No one would have been the wiser, either. Well, except for the NHL... and each individual arena’s food vendors... and every five-year-old just picking up a stick for the first time... okay, the entire hockey-watching world, really.

I mean, thinking about it now, how did the Devils think they could pass their little back-alley perversion off as legitimate? Even Methuselah could not justify playing hockey at 44 years of age... without even knowing what hockey is. It just SOUNDS like a bad idea.

There may have been other, similar deals that have tested the size of the loophole in the collective bargaining agreement, but none that seemed as much a cartoonish slap in the face of the league and the 29 other clubs therein. And besides one need only look at the Chicago Blackhawks’s signing of forward Marian Hossa to a 12-year, $62.8-million contract last year to realize that general managers only screw their teams in the long run with deals such as these.

As a result of Chicago’s myopia, yes the Hawks won the Stanley Cup, but it has also contributed to the dismantling of the team barely a breath after its victory in June. If Hossa’s deal comprised roughly three-fifths the size of Kovalchuk’s , clearly the Devils would fare about as well in the coming years as Sylvester trying to fit himself into Speedy Gonzales’s mouse hole. The meal may make the Devils’ mouths water, but the pain and agony sure to be suffered isn’t worth it, unless they’re into some weird form of sadomasochism.

If the Devils want their man bad enough, in the interest of good faith and not prolonging the torture of hockey fans, they should just bite the bullet and make it a shorter contract. If the cap hit grows, so be it. It’s not as if the Devils have Zach Parise to re-sign to a similarly huge deal next off-season, right? Oh... in that case maybe Kovalchuk can take a pay cut, then. But that’s about as likely as the selfish sniper finishing his career with more assists than goals.

Maybe instead the Devils should take a step back and look at their roster, realize they’ve already got the likes of Parise, Travis Zajac, Patrik Elias, Brian Rolston, Dainius Zubrus, Jamie Langenbrunner, and Martin Brodeur, each providing an average cap hit of over $4 million, in the lockerroom. The reason for the salary cap is to promote parity across the league. Adding Kovalchuk might make the Devils a serious contender, but they already are.

As such, it should either be back to the drawing board for both sides, or back to Russia for Kovalchuk. New Jersey really doesn’t need Kovalchuk, and fans don’t need this frustration. By elimination, that makes Kovalchuk Kontinental Hockey League bound. It may not be the best solution, but it is a solution nonetheless. Maybe he can even take the Devils with him and make this the KHL’s problem. Who knows? They might smarten up and realize that 17 years exiled in Siberia, cold as it may be, just might end up feeling a little too much like an eternity.