Enough is enough!  1-3-0 is unacceptable for a team like the Penguins that are stocked with the talent they have from forward to blue line and in into the goal.

Ok so there are injuries on the Blue Line and the Penguins sent their best option back to Juniors.  No excuse.  This team is still better from their A-line on back than 95% of the teams in the NHL.

Tonight the New York Islanders are in town.  That’s right, the New York Freaking Islanders … a team that has been one of the laughing stocks of the East in recent years.  It is time for the Pens to get serious, bear down and win on home ice for the first time this season.

It’s time for players to not just man up but to HERO UP!  I don’t care who takes up the challenge to rise to the occasion and do something beyond being mediocre during the sixty minutes they are on the ice tonight.  Someone, preferable someones, will decided that they have had enough of the losing and dig down deep to make a win possible.  Sid and Geno need to find their game.  The defense needs to put aside the bruises and defend the blue line.  Everyone needs to pick up their game.

What do you say Pens?  Ready to take up the challenge?  Ready to HERO UP and be the team that you are supposed to be?  Ready to kick some ass?

Thank God for sanity! An arbitrator ruled this week that the NHL was right to void the recently penned obscene contract between the Devils and Kovalchuk which would have been for 17 years and $102 million.
Hey, I am all for players getting what they can but when you sign a contract in bad faith, which is what the Devils and Kovalchuk did make no mistake about that, to try and circumvent a league’s salary cap I am sorry but you need to be smacked down. The deal would have had Kovalchuk playing until he was 44 years old. While not unheard of for players to play into their 40’s it is rare and quite frankly players who play at that age are almost always hardly worth the spot on the bench they occupy.

During the final five years of the contract Kovalchuk would have earned $550,000 each year. The structure of the contract in its entirety however was clearly designed to circumvent the cap and lock up Kovalchuk for a smaller hit each year than he would normally have counted for. This whole situation was made difficult because for years the NHL has sat by and allowed other players to flirt with similar contracts in terms of length and salary without much of a peep if any. Kovalchuk and the Devils were probably right to assume that they would be able to get away with this latest bizarre contract. But they did not.

Now it is back to the drawing board and it will be interesting to see what these two parties have up their sleeves as “Plan B.” There will probably be another long term deal hashed out but not as obscene as 17 years. But it will still, most likely, be a deal that is designed to circumvent the cap as best as both parties think they can get away with. They have other long term deals already accepted by the league to draw on and can always use the excuse that the league accepted those.

I honestly do not care if Kovalchuk ends up with the Devils or not when this all shakes out. In his stint with the team last year he proved a pretty ineffective part of the team and for the Devils to use him effectively they would have to reword their tried and true strategy for winning. I do not think that Kovalchuk makes the perennially dangerous Devils any more dangerous. He might make them dangerous in a different way but nothing more than that.