And Still Going Up

When the NHL's board of governors meets Tuesday morning in Manhattan, you can bet Lou Lamoriello will try and make a case that the punishment far exceeded the crime.

Lamoriello is a principled fellow. His hero is Vince Lombardi. He thought he was just playing by the rules when he signed Ilya Kovalchuk to one of those absurd "back-diving" contracts during the summer, contracts than other teams like Boston, Vancouver, Philadelphia and Detroit had signed. Heck, Chicago had done similar deals with Duncan Keith and Marian Hossa, and the Hawks had won the Stanley Cup.

But first an independent arbitrator slapped down the Devils' initial deal with Kovalchuk, and on Monday the NHL chimed in with heavy penalties including a $3 million fine, a forfeited third round draft choice, and the loss of a first round pick sometime in the next four years.

Lamoriello will try to make his case that this punishment is unfair. And it will fall on deaf ears.

See, Gary Bettman has been practically begging teams not to sign these double-digit term contracts for years - Rick DiPietro, Alex Ovechkin - and redoubled his efforts when teams began twisting the CBA even more with torqued contracts that dwindled down to tiny salaries in the final few years just to get a more appealing cap number.

So Bettman and his deputy, Bill Daly, will have no sympathy for Lamoriello. And neither will at least 20 other teams, maybe more, who either couldn't afford to agree to these Kovalchuk-type contracts or saw them as cheating and didn't want to.

Simply put, Lamoriello can complain, but nobody will be listening.

It's too bad, because given Lamoriello's history and background, he undoubtedly wasn't intentionally trying to cheat. He just ended being the wrong GM in the wrong place at the wrong time, and now the price of acquiring a player who really didn't help the Devils in the playoffs last spring has become astronomical.

First, the Devils sent forward Niclas Bergfors, defenceman Johnny Oduya and Canadian national junior team captain Patrice Cormier to Atlanta to get Kovalchuk, along with a first and second round pick. New Jersey also got a prospect and a second rounder back.

Then, after arbitrator Richard Bloch rejected the first contract, the Devils finally came up with $100 million deal that, after much discussion, was approved. Now they've been fined and had draft choices revoked on top of it, plus they still have to dump contracts to get under the salary cap.

it's hard to put a value on all of that. How much is a first round draft pick worth in dollars? But you could argue Kovalchuk will, when its all said and done, cost the Devils somewhere between $150 million and $200 million in salary, fines, prospects, draft picks and players. And it's quite likely that he won't put another body in a seat in the notoriously fickle New Jersey hockey market.

Unless Kovalchuk turns into Mario Lemieux, he can't possibly be worth all this. It's like the Devils got on a speeding bus and just couldn't get off.

Perhaps they hoped Bettman would let them off the hook after Bloch ruled Jersey hadn't intentionally circumvented the salary cap. But the commissioner really couldn't. For starters, teams were clamouring for him to take action. He'd fined the Leafs $500,000 and taken away a fourth round pick for messing with the contract of a middling defenceman named Jonas Frogren. He'd hammered the St. Louis Blues back in 1999 for tampering five years earlier with Devils defenceman Scott Stevens, fining the Blues $1.5 million and taking away two first round picks, effectively.

There was just no chance the Devils were going to get away without punishment. In fact, it could have been worse. Under the collective bargaining agreement, they stood to lose the same amount in cap space that they were fined, a nightmarish prospect given that they are already over the cap. But as part of the larger, complicated deal that allowed Kovalchuk's contract to be approved and new CBA rules to be installed making it more difficult to sign these kinds of contracts, the league and union agreed that the Devils wouldn't be fined more than $3 million and there wouldn't be any salary cap implications.

So, yes, it could have been worse for the Devils.

The likely outcome at today's board of governors meetings will be a brief discussion, and then on to other business. If the Devils try and pursue this much further, they risk becoming the kind of renegades they were perceived to be back in the 1988 playoffs when Jim Schoenfeld told Don Koharski to have another doughnut.

They can scream about the Bruins, Canucks, Flyers, Red Wings and Hawks getting away with the very same crime for which they are being punishment, and they won't be wrong.

But it won't get them anywhere, leaving them married for the next 15 years to a player who, unless he becomes a hockey version of Peyton Manning or Kobe Bryant overnight, can't possibly deliver value for the cost of acquisition.

Comments

[adam]

"...given Lamoriello's history and background, he undoubtedly wasn't intentionally trying to cheat."

How could the author know that at all? It seems to me he was intentionally pushing the line on these contracts to a new place. At what point does "gaming the system" become "cheating"? Lamoriello was certainly gaming the system, and given the extent of it and how ridiculous pretty much everybody thought the contract was, I'd say it crossed into cheating.

And Lamoriello certainly isn't dumb, so he knew what he was doing. As for "He just ended being the wrong GM in the wrong place at the wrong time".... please. Where the does the buck stop? Isn't the GM pretty much the guy in charge? I know there's an owner, but c'mon, he's not the ticket sales guy. I'm tired of Lamoriello getting free passes all the time. They haven't made it past the 2nd round since they won the cup.... that's 6 seasons and counting.

[Matt B]

The speeding bus analogy is apt. There is no way Kovy is worth as much as he has cost the Devils. He's a very good player, just not a franchise player.

[KD]

The only reason the Devils are being punished is for making Buttman look bad. To suggest otherwise is preposterous. The contract, even the original one, was legal under the terms of the CBA. There's a huge difference between the tampering in the Stevens and Frogren cases and the creativity of this contract. Once again, Buttman has shown that all he cares about is his own ego, not the good of the game. If the owners had any sense, they'd vote him off the island at their meeting next week.

[Chris]

Makes the Kessel deal look like a bargain.

[Eric G]

It's still ridiculous that Jersey gets penalized while some of these other teams don't. How could they approve Luongo's contract, for example, but not Kovalchuk's? It's incredible that the league let things get to this point before attempting to address the problem by amending the CBA; it's made them look incompetent and hypocritical, and interfered with off-season transactions in general.

[Arhtur Bailey]

I think it is wrong for the NHL to levy a fine or deny draft picks. They only need to do this because they have not found a buyer for the Phoenix Coyotes and are bleeding money. They'll take it where they can find it.

Next time the board of governors has to vote on a Jim Balsillie-type becoming an owner, I sure hope Lamouriello can convince others not to be supportive of Bettman.

[victor Tanti]

Lou Lamarello always gets pladitudes for being such a nice guy. It was him that wiggled his way out of an Alexander Molgilny contract using grey areas of the CBA. It served him well. This time he made another deal with the "Devil" by going to the grey area again and got burned. GOOD! That is the thing about the grey area it can become blabk in a hurry. Don't whine Lou, take your medicine and cry a river on your own.

[Mikey Air]

As much as I hate it, Lamoriello did nothing wrong. The NHL, Bettman and the Board of Governors approved the CBA. They set the rules, and now they don't like it? Tough! You made your bed, now you have to sleep in it. Every large company has people employed (lawyers usually) whose sole purpose is to find loopholes in the rules to give your company a better chance at making more profit - it's just smart business. If you don't like it, then when the time comes, change the rules, but don't punish someone who took advantage of a mistake you made in setting those rules without breaking them.

[mark]

KD..your anti Bettman rant is so typical. Bettman won't get fired; I gaurantee the other owners and GMs love this move to clamp down on these ridiculous contracts. As for 'good of the game'... how do see trying to circumvent the collective bargaining agreement as 'good for the game?' Lou gambled and he lost. Bettman had to draw a line in the sand, or the CBA would become a useless piece of paper.

[mike]

"it's hard to put a value on all of that. How much is a first round draft pick worth in dollars? But you could argue Kovalchuk will, when its all said and done, cost the Devils somewhere between $150 million and $200 million in salary, fines, prospects, draft picks and players"

Can you please explain this? Kovalchuk costs $100 MM. The fine is $3 MM. So that's $103 MM there.

We have a 1st round pick and 3rd round pick. Are they worth $47-$97 MM? If so, how did you arrive at that figure?