NHL Rejects Kovalchuk Deal After Lou Lamoriello Says "We Shouldn't Have These"

The question is if the NHLPA lawyers really think an arbiter will buy the argument that this isn’t circumventing the cap. And I think Lou’s remarks hurt them the most when it comes to this. When you’ve got the GM of the team that issued the deal essentially saying “Hey we pushed the rules as far as we could because we thought there was no way the NHL would come back on us” you’re gonna have issues.

I bet you see what Bob’s predicting, and the Devils take a couple years off the end, and get the term down to 12 or 13 years. Basically they’ll make it look more like Hossa’s deal and take a bigger cap hit.

A team like NJ could probably get someone like Nashville, the Islanders or at this point the Canes to take on one of these high cap hit but a low salary deals by the end of it. As long as every team is maxed out against the cap the players will be dumpable when they aren’t actually making the money. Sure they’d have to send a sweetener with it, but if the player worked out over the long run the team would have no regrets.

The bigger worry is injuries. Case in point: Rick DiPietro. Having a guy with a high salary who can’t stay healthy is way more of a problem. While the guy might retire when he’s got league minimums left, no one who can feasibly play is going to bow out just to keep his team from eating a couple million dollars.

That’s just it, they won’t be stuck with him. Since it wasn’t an over 35 deal he could have retired as opposed to playing for that much money and it wouldn’t have counted against the Cap for the Devils.

Unless he retires, then they aren’t stuck with him at all.

I’d have no issue with the deal as it was if the Devils had to honor all 17 years no matter what. From that perspective a rule that said any multiyear deal that took a player past, lets say 40, are subject to the 35+ retirement rule would make it the deals palatable.

Cap hit is defined as average annual value. I can’t tell you what that was selected over actual salary per year.

The cap shouldn’t equal a player salary for one year because it can get abused even worse than the system as it is. The reason is it allows for backloaded terms that mean a team could stock up on talent in the short run. And other kinds of shenanigans.

For instance Chicago could have structured multi-year deals for a few of the players they had to trade away that averaged what the players expected but paid a lower amount for next year as a way to try and repeat. They would have had to blow the team up eventually, but theoretically it means you could stack a team with talent for a year or two before having to blow it up.

Or a team could issue a Kovulchuck like deal for a younger player, high pay early with a low end. That would make the guy really easy to unload to a top team in his last year. You wouldn’t have to worry about the cap hit to the team taking him on.

Said this above, but if the PA goes to arbitration and the arbiter rules against them then the PA will lose one of it’s biggest bargaining chips in negotiations. My bet is something gets worked out in the next five days (time PA has to file a grievance) and this gets pushed off to the CBA.