Take it for what it's worth. According to an ESPN report, the Devils' richest star in franchise history Ilya Kovalchuk could be getting
I want you to repeat this 10 times fast.
SEV-----EN-----TEEN YEARS ONE---HUNDRED-----AND------FIF------TY MILL-----I---ON!!!!!!
UPDATE: Well, no great shock that Scott Burnside was wrong. The official numbers are 17 years for a cool $102 million. At six million a pop, I'd say Kovalchuk took a huge discount just so he could finish the rest of his career in the Garden State. Maybe he wanted to upstage buddy Alex Ovechkin. But there's no way he's worth as much as Ovi and that played out with many teams not even bothering. Is Ilya one of the best pure snipers in the game? Absolutely. Can he put up points in a hurry? No doubt. But what other team was seriously going to give him that much security? Not only did Lou once again score big here but got the exciting Russian at a bargain, which means he should be able to re-sign top priority Zach Parise next summer. Only the Devils could pull something like this off. That's what you get when the GM knows too many loopholes in what's become a flawed system. So much for the cap resolving everything.
How is it good for the league that basically, three teams vyed for his services and one was from the KHL? He priced himself out. Here's one huge question we're hoping a reporter will have enough guts to ask tomorrow.
Q: Were the Devils your top choice?
A:
:as Dean Lombardi chokes up his drink:
4 comments:
Well give Larry Brooks credit, he's basically the only one who had this offer and it was days ago.
I'm ecstatic...Kovy returns against the odds and at a $6 million cap hit to boot, we may only have to get rid of either Salvador or White because the figure's so low. Sure it's a lot of up-front money but that's Vanderbeek's issue.
Front-loaded contracts have become a staple in recent years, this league better not make a big deal about our seventeen years when the Flyers didn't take grief over Pronger's deal.
BTW the press conference will be live on MSG+ tomorrow. I might post later but you've summed it up pretty well. Glad I only saw the initial reports of him signing at noon and not the idiot Burnside's off numbers. He can't wait to opine or report anything that puts us in a bad light.
Scratch that last part it won't be carried live, I read the note wrong. But it will be posted on MSG.com after its conclusion.
shame on MSG for not having it live. There are zero excuses.
And yes, Brooksie nailed it. Go figure.
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