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.