No Dice Ilya

So when I heard about the Ilya Kovalchuk 17 year, $102 million dollar contract, I was in disbelief. The dude is already 27 and it is highly irrational to expect a hockey player to play until he is 44. However, his objective was obviously to make an extra $100 million before he retired as a player and this allowed him to do that, and at the same time allowed New Jersey to have a great salary cap figure for a player of his caliber. A $6 million cap hit for one of the best players in the league, sounds too good to be true, and well it turns out it is!

I was happy to see that the NHL nixed the deal. About time they did based on all the long term deals being cut to try to circumvent the CBA. There are two things I found wrong with this contract. The first I mentioned which is that it is highly unlikely that he can play for the full term of the contract, and as a result he was being paid a majority of the money up front so that if he does retire he still gets away with making a lot of money. However the second thing I found weird was that in the later years (should he actually be able to play), he gets paid a league minimum of $550,000...but what happens if the league minimum goes up? And in 17 years time it probably will, assuming we're not all dead by 2012. I guess that's not a big issue as they would probably just have to bump up the money they pay him, but I guess it's all moot now.

The NHL has an easy solution to this:

Make the team pay the player the salary cap figure each yeah instead of paying different amounts in different years. This would prevent players wanting to sign these long term deals. If the money is spread out evenly, they will sign a shorter deal, therefore not compromising the integrity of the salary cap. For example, if Ilya Kovalchuk retires at 40, he would have still made more than 90% of the money offered in the contract, but if he was paid his salary cap figure of $6 million per year and retired at 40, he is walking away from 24% of his contract rather than about 10%. This would really get the player thinking about the money they are walking away from and make them sign more reasonable contracts.

Either way, good call on the NHL's part to axe the deal, but some sort of preventative measure needs to come into place. I wonder if "Kovi" will still sign with the Devils now?