Curious About Kovalchuk

I was actually thinking of doing a quick blurb on how I thought the Ilya Kovalchuk free agency situation may go down this Summer and I was kind of derailed by the word that a KHL club has come down adding fuel to the fire.  If there is any truth to the reports that SKA St. Petersburg has given Kovalchuk a 3-year/$30 million offer, it really blows the socks off a little bit, doesn't it?

SKA St. Petersburg doesn't have to wait until Kovalchuk's contract is officially up to start throwing numbers at him, unlike the rest of the NHL clubs, which gives them a full month of a head start to tempt the Russian superstar back home for the near future.  Of course, I don't think anyone will be putting any pens to paper until the current deal expires, since that would create a bit of a stir, even after a reported memorandum between the NHL and KHL, in regards to transfer agreements.

In the blurb I had half-prepared, I was going to go on about what kind of value Kovalchuk was going to get from clubs, if he makes it to unrestricted free agency and to his own benefit, I think he can really write his own meal ticket with a new deal.  There have been rumours that Kovalchuk was looking for somewhere near the salary cap maximum and there have also been reports that he'd take significantly less money if he can play for a winner, which does make a lot of sense, since a lot of those Cup favourites are already tightly wound to their budgets and pressing up against the cap ceiling.  I, personally, picture the whole situation more like a sliding scale, where you can lump a lot of the rebuilding teams together and call that a cap maximum for his services, while some of the better teams can have him at a reasonable discount of a long-term cap hit of $6.5 or $7 million.  I don't doubt there is something in between those numbers as well, but that's me just being creative.

This offer to Kovalchuk does open the door to all sorts of conclusions we can all jump to and read about over and over and over again.  If Kovalchuk takes the deal, we should be able to conclude that he went for the money, because he couldn't get the right combination of winning and money in the NHL or he's just plain greedy.  If he stays in the NHL and takes less money, we can turn our noses up on the KHL and all believe that we cheer for the best hockey league in the world.  Sure, there is plenty of in between in there, but I wanted to make sure we all know what we were up against, because what we read doesn't believe in the in-between.

Nevertheless, I could really care less about where Kovalchuk wants to play and I couldn't really be bothered either way if he stays or goes.  The NHL, on the other hand, should be greatly concerned with how Kovalchuk decides his own fate, because once the KHL poaches a former number one overall pick like Kovalchuk, despite being Russian and so forth, what's to say that the KHL doesn't start poaching more top end talent for their league... despite most of them also being Russian?