It's cap circumvention, though. Everyone
knows that Kovalchuk will not be playing when he's 44, just as Hossa won't be playing when he's 41. Basically, retirement prior to the expiration of the contract is clearly an integral part of these negotiations and offers, and the only reason the NHL can't come down on them (yet) is because it's rather difficult to prove intent. The problem with saying something like, "Well, it's similar to the other contracts, only five years longer!" is that GMs just get more and more brazen, until you get ridiculous contracts that no side has any intention or desire to fulfill ... oh wait, we're already there with Kovalchuk. The flipside is that it fucks over every other team that actually plays by the rules and signs players to contracts with honest cap hits. This isn't a matter of teams being able to field a competitive product -- it's about players saying, "Fuck your salary cap, I still want my massive payday."
The point is that the cap is being circumvented and the door is open for anyone who wants to do it until the NHL grows a sack and clamps down on it. That, or we'll just get another work stoppage when the NHL moves to close this loophole in the next CBA and the NHLPA decides to raise holy hell. A strike is looking pretty likely in 2012, with the momentum that Eric Lindros and his fellow hardliners in the NHLPA have been generating; they're getting ready to hire Donald Fehr (who kicked the dogshit out of MLB and made the MLBPA retardedly powerful) as their executive director and go to the mattresses over the cap.
Let's look at it this way:
Last 6 years of Lecavalier's contract: $35 million
Last 6 years of Zetterberg's contract: $27.35 million
Last 6 years of Pronger's contract: $26.85 million
Last 6 years of Luongo's contract: $20.428 million
Last 6 years of Keith's contract: $19.2 million
Last 6 years of Franzen's contract: $17.5 million
Last 6 years of Hossa's contract: $15.9 million
Last 6 years of Kovalchuk's contract: $3.5 million.
Basically, Lamoriello decided to get cute and add on a shit-ton of years at $550,000 each. It's amazing how ballsy he is. But all of these contracts, with the possible exception of Pronger (whose contract is just hilarious), have years tacked on with the sole intention of lowering the overall cap hit. Circumvention is circumvention, and this contract trend is
not good for the NHL. It's perversely hilarious that we missed a year of hockey and did serious permanent damage to the game as a whole to create this CBA, which is turning out to be as effective as first-year 0% APR in preventing another rapid descent into overspending.
I didn't see Kovalchuk fitting well in NJ a few months ago, and was mostly proven right.
10 goals and 17 assists in 27 games is "not fitting well?"
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