Former Devil Ilya Kovalchuk is still a lightning rod around the NHL (TSN.ca)

As Derek already wrote about, the NHL surprisingly (or not, depending on your point of view) reduced the Devils’ already contreversial Ilya Kovalchuk contract penalty by cutting the $3 million fine in half and deciding not to take away our first-round pick entirely, instead just moving it to the end of the round with the caveat that we can’t trade the pick.  Originally the Devils were supposed to surrender a first-rounder in any of the next four seasons soon after the Stanley Cup Finals of that year.  With this being the fourth year since the punishment and the Devils not having given up the first yet, they took their final chance to appeal the ruling and won – at least in the respect that they do have a first-round pick now.  Whatever disagreements I have with Gary Bettman in other areas, he showed some fortitude in this case by doing the right thing despite dealing with a league full of whiners and hypocrites who clearly didn’t like the commish’s reversal and no doubt were salivating at the thought of us giving up a lottery pick for nothing this year.

I don’t doubt the Devils deserved some punishment for the initial contract, which was definitely more over the line than other contracts, but the level of the initial punishment (1st, 3rd and $3 million) was so over the top it was ridiculous.  Particularly given that nobody else was punished at all for other similar cap-busting contracts, including the Senators who the league didn’t do anything to even after Daniel Alfredsson admitted publicly his last contract in Ottawa was cap circumvention.  At least not until the new CBA which saw the retroactive implementation of cap recapture penalties, which do penalize teams capwise if players retire before their contract is up and they have below cap value salary years left on the deal, although you need to go to MIT to figure out the formula one uses to determine what the cap penalties are at what point in each player’s contract.

However, that only put everyone on a level playing field…the Devils’ Kovalchuk punishment in fact was a double punishment for us given Kovy’s early retirement this year left us with a $250,000 cap penalty for the next dozen years.  I might have blamed Bettman and right hand man Bill Daly for the initial ruling some but even then I realized to a degree that they were only attempting to keep the hounds at bay.  Especially when it came out after the punishment that many in the league thought that was too soft, that we should have been made to surrender a first-rounder immediately…which would have been disasterous as it turned out, since we wound up with the fourth overall pick that year.  One unnamed GM called our Kovalchuk contract ‘criminal’.  Other execs like Bruins GM Peter Chiarelli and Caps owner Ted Leonsis weren’t shy about putting their names on the record bashing our deal.

Funny I don’t remember the outrage from any of these guys when Roberto Luongo signed a deal until he was 43, or Marian Hossa signed a deal with several suspiciously cheap years tacked on at the end of it – among other dubious cap contracts that went unpunished.  Every GM in the league would have done the same thing if they could get a world-class player like Kovalchuk onto their roster and most proved it by skirting the NHL’s ‘spirit of the law’ themselves.  Yet these same hypocrites couldn’t wait to see us dropped under the guillotine.  Where I most faulted the league is the fact they punished us so harshly even after their own arbiter (Richard Bloch) admitted after overturning the contract that there was no overt evidence of collusion by the Devils.  With Kovalchuk having since went off to Russia jumping in rubles like Scrooge McDuck with gold coins, it seems obvious the league rethought the level of their punishment for our contract.  Though clearly they won’t admit the fact Kovy’s no longer in the NHL played a factor.  Others suspect it was the NHL doing new ownership a favor, especially since we filed the appeal in January and the league clearly had no love lost for former owner Jeff Vanderbeek.

Whatever the reason for the NHL’s reversal, I doubt the timing was coincidental considering it was announced the day after the trade deadline.  If it had been announced before, perhaps the waters would have been poisoned too badly for us to make any trades given that the babies who run the league are whining again about how Bettman did Lou Lamoriello a favor.  As if moving down in the first round, losing a third-rounder and being fined was a small inconvenience.  Depending on how you want to look at it, this either justifies or takes Lamoriello off the hook for keeping Stefan Matteau (the #29 pick) two summers ago.  For sure, it removes one of the black clouds from this season.  We might still be ashen if we miss the playoffs and lose what would have been a lottery pick under the new system, though going from anywhere around 10-16 to 30 isn’t anywhere near as bad as forefitting the pick entirely.