Cap Hit Math

Let the Ilya Kovalchuk Sweeps begin! Again!


Most of you probably know that an arbitrator ruled Ilya Kovalchuk's Deal with the Devils was a deliberate attempt to circumvent the NHL's salary cap, and allowed the league to void it, thus making Ilya a free agent all over again. The saga continues.


Indeed. There wasn't a whole lot of doubt about the fact that Kovalchuk's contract was designed to work around the salary cap. All they did was add a few extra years to the end of the contract with a bare minimum salary in order to make the average lower. This assumes that he won't retire once the numbers start going down...which given the length of the contract is about as far from a valid assumption as it gets. Watching Ilya, the Devils GM, and the team owner at the press conference giggling like school girls about putting one over on the league didn't exactly help their case.

Of course, the counter to this argument is that there are already a couple heavily front-loaded contracts like this one in the league (See: Pronger, Chris and Hossa, Marian) and why the league chose to arbitrarily draw its line at Kovalchuk's contract is a little fishy. The conspiracy theorists are quick to jump to the conclusion that the NHL wants Kovalchuk to play in a larger market to draw more money to the league. Whatever the reason, a stand needed to be taken, and probably should have been done before, but wasn't.

It's too bad, too...since I just did the math to come up with a contract of my own that follows the same system as Kovalchuk's now-negated deal. If I assume that I'm going to work until I'm 65 (also maybe an invalid assumption, but we'll go with it), and earn modest 4% raises each year, I figured out roughly how much money I'm going to earn in my career. If we just front-load that deal, and have me earn in the neighbourhood of $900,000 a year for the next 5 years, I can work for minimum wage until I'm 65 and come out with the same amount of money. Of course, there's no guarantee that I won't retire after those 5 years and go work somewhere else (See Favre, Brett), but it's a chance I'd be willing to take. Unfortunately, now the NHL put the kibosh on that sort of contract, so I'm stuck working for a while longer.