NHL Nukes Kovalchuk Signing
I’m sure most of you have probably heard the news by now. The NHL has drawn a line in the sand, and said ‘Hey, you’ve made a fool of us for a few years now, but on July 20, 2010 – it stops.’ And that’s really all they did. They’ve ignored very similar contracts to Kovalchuk’s in the past (Marian Hossa, Henrik Zetterberg, Chris Pronger, Roberto Luongo), but for whatever reason called the Devils on this one.
Its lame. The NHL left a loophole in when they closed negotiations for the last CBA. They spent a lot of time patting themselves on the back for getting a salary cap and cost certainty, and didn’t think there could possibly be anyone smarter than them out there. And then some crafty agent came up with the long term contract.
But – and this is important – there are two parties to any contract. The very owners that were crowing over cost certainty are a party to these extra long deals. If they don’t have a problem with it (and if it isn’t against the rules), the NHL needs to step back, lick its wounds and regroup for the next round of CBA negotiations. Negotiations which have the potential to be very ugly indeed.
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I’m calling shenanigans on the whole thing. Lamariello had to know the league was going to put the brakes on this thing and went ahead with the press conference like it was some big thing. You know what he was doing? He was trying to lure as many season ticket sales in the shortest amount of time as he could before the plug would be pulled. Some call it shrewd marketing…I call it fraud.
Again, just my opinion but I am a conspiracy theorist.
I don’t think so, because he didn’t actually break any rules. He might have wanted to make the NHL set some rules, but he didn’t do anything that a previous team hadn’t already done.
I’m not saying he broke a rule. I am saying he knew the league was going to step in so he acted fast to get the word out that they were a “contender”. I mean really, we have no idea what went on behind the scenes leading up to this but with the age of everyone leaking stories for a few bucks, don’t you find it fishy that after a month of silence, a contract for 17 freakin’ years materializes out of thin air?
Again, my pessimism sometimes gets the best of me.