Kovalchuk Signed to NJ

[scsavre]

Alright now that we got him out of the way the trading can begin.

Sounds like Gagne is already on his way to Tampa.

Hopefully the wild can make a move.

NJ is going to be way over their cap now, maybe the Wild can steal someone. I see Parise is a RFA next year. Wouldnt that be nice. Not gonna this year. But would be cool.

[Bear55]

I'm guessing NJ finds a way to sign Parise. I wouldn't be against trading for him but I am guessing we would have to overpay to get him and it would probably gut our team and future in the process.

We could try one of those offer sheet "thingys" but NJ would have to be in pretty bad cap shape and they still might find a way to dump salary and match any offer Parise gets. We would also have to give up our next 4 1st round draft picks but I think Parise would be worth it.

[solbes]

It's not like we EVER use our first round draft picks in a good way. The last one was Koivu, but this is a very rare event for the Wild.

We need to rebuild, but we don't seem to have the depth in our program to do it. Therefore we better go out and make some trades. Parise might be a stretch, but there has to be some players out there that we can target.

[spearchucker]

I think they are 1.8 mil over from what I can tell. They will be dumping next year just like Chicago had to.

[scsavre]

They gotta be more than $1.8 over. They only have $2.3 of space prior to signing Kovo and that is with only 12 forwards. I guess I dont know, but I would think they are squezed tighter then 1.8

[scsavre]

Also sounds like Wild are really talking to a lot of teams right now. Alot of that talk has been with Kaberle. I hope they make the right moves. Either way I am sure the MN fans will be unhappy. They will say not enough was done, or we paid too much etc.

[cbrooks]

I was a little surprise that the contract for Kavolchuk was 17 years. Thats some commitment there. The way the contract breaks down looks like its to work around the salary cap. Maybe the Wild will be looking to do the same type of signings.

[jwmiller33]

I was a little surprise that the contract for Kavolchuk was 17 years. Thats some commitment there. The way the contract breaks down looks like its to work around the salary cap. Maybe the Wild will be looking to do the same type of signings.

ya i cant believe no one mentioned the 17 year part of the contract prior to you!!!! its crazy that the reason he wanted 17 years was because his lucky number/number he wears on his jersey is 17. he also waited 17 days into free agency to make the signing, which happened on july 17th... how crazy is that??? i think this guy is a little nuts over "17"!

[cbrooks]

its crazy that the reason he wanted 17 years was because his lucky number/number he wears on his jersey is 17. he also waited 17 days into free agency to make the signing, which happened on july 17th... how crazy is that??? i think this guy is a little nuts over "17"!

[MinnesnowtaWild]

It's signings like this one that will lead to another lock out. It's a loophole in the current CBA that allows teams to sign big name players to a long term contract to keep the cap hit down.

There is no way Kovalchuk plays all 17 years...maybe 10. Then when he retires the Devils are off the hook. He would not play for 500,000 bucks for the last 5-6 years of that contract anyways. Imagine the inflation involved in that.

[scsavre]

All that 17 stuff is just stupid, who does that.

I guess it might not matter now, the NHL rejected the contract anyway. Now what. Is Kovo going to end up in KHL.

[jwmiller33]

Quote:

Guess the NHL didn't buy Ilya Kovalchuk's claims that he planned to go all Chris Chelios and play right through to the end of his league-record 17-year, $102 million deal with the New Jersey Devils.

[+] Enlarge

Bruce Bennett/Getty Images

Martin Brodeur, left, and the Devils welcomed back Ilya Kovalchuk on Tuesday, but the NHL later rejected the forward's record deal.

Or make that former deal.

Sources told ESPN.com late Tuesday night the NHL rejected the historic pact because it believes the contract contravenes elements of the collective-bargaining agreement.

The league's response to the Kovalchuk deal, signed Monday, is shocking on a number of fronts.

More than a year ago, the league warned GMs that it was unhappy with the number of long-term deals whose cap hit was made more manageable by heavily front-loading the contract and tacking on years at the end. These deals worked for players because they made most of the money early in the contract; the deals worked for GMs who were looking to keep the average cap hit as low as possible, giving them more financial flexibility.

Marian Hossa, for instance, will see his paycheck go from $7.9 million at the start of his 12-year deal in Chicago to $750,000 at the end with an annual cap hit of $5.233 million. Roberto Luongo signed a 12-year deal that will see his earnings drop from a high of $10 million (in 2010-11) to $1 million at the end (in 2020-21 and 2021-22).

The league hates these deals. The NHL believes many of them are bogus because they will last longer than the players' careers, thus circumventing the spirit of the CBA. While league officials made their feelings of unhappiness well known to GMs, they did not outright reject deals made with players like Hossa, Luongo, Chris Pronger, Marc Savard and Johan Franzen, among others. They accepted the deals, later investigated them and, in the end, let them be.

Presumably, the NHL found no evidence of an agent or player giving a team the old "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" about not playing after a certain point in the contract since the team wouldn't be on the hook for the rest of the deal (provided the player wasn't 35 when the contract took effect, as was the case with the contract extension Pronger signed with Philadelphia).

Clearly, though, the league believed its warning to cease and desist these kinds of deals was falling on deaf ears; and when it saw the whopper deal Kovalchuk, his agent Jay Grossman and New Jersey president and GM Lou Lamoriello came up with, the league said "enough."

And there is a lot about the deal that flies in the face of the league's warnings. There's the term (17 years), which would make Kovalchuk 44 if he actually played through to the end of the deal. He told reporters Tuesday that was his intention. But, well, what else was he going to say? "Actually, I'll likely hang 'em up after Year 10 because that's when the money really starts to disappear."

That may be the truth -- Kovalchuk would have earned $95 million of the contract's $102 million value through the first 10 years with a top end of $11.5 million. In the last five years of the deal, should he still be tottering around the ice, Kovalchuk will pull in just $550,000 annually. In pro-sports parlance, that's living well below the poverty line.

So, instead of biding its time, the league stepped out of character, big time. It let Kovalchuk and the Devils have a nice love-in Tuesday afternoon in Newark with cameras and photographers and reporters. The league never bothered to give the team a heads-up that there was trouble in contract city. The league let it all play out and then slammed the door on the Lou & Co. as the news leaked out late Tuesday night.

Now, it's going to get really interesting. The NHL Players' Association will have five days to decide whether to grieve the league's rejection of the contract. Expect the union will do just that, unless someone comes up with some sort of flaw in the contract that directly defies language in the CBA.

There are regulations in the CBA that cover fluctuations in contract payments. For instance, a source told ESPN.com on Tuesday night that a player can't get paid $10 million one year and $1 million the next; and there have been contracts that have had to be altered to ensure those regulations were followed.

Given that Lamoriello, one of the architects of the CBA during the lockout, was at the helm and Grossman, a veteran agent, was riding herd on things from the player's end, it would be shocking if the basis for the rejection was something as simple as that.

This leaves us to surmise that the league will somehow have to argue this deal is different than all the other ones it accepted.

But is it? Over the past year, GMs regularly told ESPN.com that while the league may not have liked the way these kinds of contracts came together, there was absolutely nothing in the CBA to stop them from doing it.

Apparently, the NHL has now called the GMs' bluff.

pretty interesting read. ive never heard of a league (NHL, NFL, MLB, NBA) rejecting a contract signing. it will be interesting to see what deal they end up signing after the first one got rejected. i love how the league basically called [PoorWordUsage] that he would be playing at 44. and the fluctuations in yearly salary payments is also a dead giveaway kovalchuk didnt think he would be fulfilling that whole contract. if he actually thought he was going to be playing at 44, he would want to be paid more than 500k for it

[Bear55]

ya i cant believe no one mentioned the 17 year part of the contract prior to you!!!! its crazy that the reason he wanted 17 years was because his lucky number/number he wears on his jersey is 17. he also waited 17 days into free agency to make the signing, which happened on july 17th... how crazy is that??? i think this guy is a little nuts over "17"!

I think we all kind of expected one of these bogus cap friendly contracts but the NHL rejecting it is the real interesting part. The contract was certainly over the top but they should have nipped this is the bud the first time they saw one of these deals.

[OnAFly]

Apparently the league has warned teams teams about contracts like these before. Hopefully they can keep this one rejected. I'm guessing both parties had a feeling the contract would be rejected, but thought it was worth a try.

[spearchucker]

NHL rejected the contract. The only reason for the long contract was to get the cap hit down. He could walk away at any time in that contract and the Devils would be off the hook for the money. The long term contacts like this are fake and only exist to get around the cap.

[genegodawa]

Wish I could get a 17 yr deal at my job...and I'm 54.

[spearchucker]

Wish I could get a 17 yr deal at my job...and I'm 54.

He never had any intention of playing that long. It was all to get around the salary cap. That is why the NHL rejected the contract.

[OnAFly]

They are looking into Luongo's 12 year contract too. Probably won't look into Ovie's, too valuable to the league

[Bear55]

Doesn't Ovie have close to a 10 mil cap hit, that sound pretty legit to me but many others are suspect.

[OnAFly]

Thought it was lower. May be mistaken

[scsavre]

Do you guys remember when the league was questioning Havlats contract. Maybe the league should just count what a player makes against the cap, rather then taking the average or whatever they do.

[Bear55]

That would make too much sense [pleasebecomeasponsor].