Should the NHL stop the Ilya Kovalchuk deal?
No one would say that the New Jersey Devils’ and Ilya Kovalchuk deal should be taken at face value. No, Kovalchuk will not be playing Hockey for $650,000 a year when he is 44 years old. The deal really is meant to circumvent the salary cap, there is no denying that. That is not the real question. The question is – ‘So what?’
Deputy Commissioner of the NHL, Bill Dally, said something to that effect, something about how the deal was rejected by the NHL because it constitutes a blatant breach of the collective bargaining agreement and seeks to circumvent the salary cap. We are not disagreeing with the deputy commissioner. The New Jersey Devils’ used a loop hole in the collective bargaining agreement but still the deal is perfectly legal and conforms with all NHL rules.
It is not even the first deal of its kind. We have seen front-loaded contracts before. Marian Hossa was given a similar contract by the Stanley Cup Champions, the Chicago Blackhawks. Another example would be Chris Pronger’s deal with the Philadelphia Flyers. That contract pays Chris just a million dollars in the final two years of his contract.
Where was the NHL when those contracts were inked? Is it now fair that the Blackhawks are prevented from using the same tools their competitors have been allowed? Granted the Kovalchuk deal pushes the limit of front-loaded contracts considering over 95% of the amount payable would be received by Kovalchuk in the first 11 years of his 17 year contract but the contracts are fundamentally the same.
Also it is not entirely unheard of that a player continues his career into his forties. We can make a rather educated guess and say that Kovalchuk will not be playing that long but how exactly would the NHL go about proving that in front of the arbitrator who would be assigned to this case? What exactly is their evidence? There is none. Nothing can definitively show that there is an understanding between the Devils and Kovalchuk that he will not play his final years. None of the parties involved would explicitly admit such a thing. That is what makes it such a good loop-hole.
If anything should be done, the loop-hole should be fixed in the next collective bargaining agreement (CBA). Leaving the Devils out of something that other franchises have been allowed to make use of is just as unfair as the Devils’, the Blackhawk’s and the Flyer’s attempt, albeit a legal attempt, to circumvent the salary cap. The problem is a flawed collective bargaining agreement.
Plugging the hole in the flawed CBA should not be impossible. The rules need to be more clearly defined for retiring players. The CBA stipulates that contracts signed for players aged 35 and above are etched in stone and in the case of retirement or injury the team is stuck with the salary cap hit for that player until the contract expires.
Kovalchuk is 27 and when he retires, as he most surely will, the Devils’ will not have to carry the cap hit for the remainder of the years under the original contract. This should be easy enough to fix.
If the Devils had to take a salary cap hit of 6 million for the next 17 years, the deal probably would have never been signed. Or some other ingenious smoke and mirror contract would have been thought up to make it easier for rich franchises to get all the good players.
The salary cap itself is based on flawed premises. The limit set is calculated by average revenue of the 30 franchises. It starts to get ridiculous right then and there because the New York Rangers revenue is nowhere near the Florida Panther’s revenue. It is not even the same postal code. Then how does it make sense that the salary caps for both franchises are so intrinsically linked while their economies have no link what so ever?
The problem is not specific to the Kovalchuk contract. The CBA is terribly flawed and Kovalchuk saga could just be the precursor to another full blown NHL vs Players Association war. It needs to be fixed as early as possible.
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