A person asked me on Twitter yesterday what I thought of the Ilya Kovalchuk's contract. I said, ‘I bet the NHL looks at Kovy's deal.’ Apparently, that was a good prediction as the league has rejected the Kovalchuk’s contract. This was also confirmed by
Fire and Ice.
Tuesday night REJECTION: The NHL has rejected the Kovalchuk contract for salary-cap circumvention. The Devils have declined comment, but now this gets interesting. As I outlined below Monday, the intent of this contract was clear, but it seemed to me to be legal under the laws of the CBA. There is a provision in the CBA, however, that prohibits teams from circumventing the intent of the rules.
Where does this go from here? Humorously, the league waited to make its decision well after the theater of the news conference earlier today.
The problem that I see is the league allowed numerous other contracts that were similar in intent, from Chris Pronger to Roberto Luongo. The league has warned teams that if they continued to construct contracts like this, there would be consequences. This is a clear message by the NHL, but I see a little duel on the horizon. [Russo's Rants]
This comes off as very hypocritical on the nhl's part. How do they reject kovy's contract but not reject hossa's, savard's, pronger's, zetterberg's, franzen's, etc?
ReplyDeleteI suspect the player's association will appeal the rejection and then the nhl will be in a dogfight. There is no way the nhl can prove that the devils and kovy agreed that he would retire before the end of that contract unless one of them were dumb enough to admit it. Other than than the contract is totally compliant with the collective bargaining agreement.
How about lou going through with that press conference yesterday when sources say he already new the nhl planned to reject the contract? Nice of him to dupe the devils fans into buying a few more season tickets because they thought kovy was coming.