Tommy_Like_Wingy

I'd say it hardly makes the cap pointless. The cap basically forces great players like Kovalchuk/Hossa/Zetterberg to choose between success or money. Why should great players be forced to go to crappy teams with cap room just to get paid what they deserve? And without the ability to sign players to contracts like this then great franchises like ours that develop young talent into successful NHL stars have to trade them away when they're in their prime because we can't afford them anymore. So bottom feeder teams just benefit from all of the hard work the Wings organization puts forth.

Probably to sell them out of spite.

I'd still like to see him in a winged wheel.

I think they should do what the NBA does with the luxury tax. It's one of the few things the NBA does right. It seems fair for everyone.

Do you know him personally? Anyway, a TV show wouldn't really work since he'd be talking in Russian so all the hilarious "lost in translation" type of stuff he says in English won't be there.

And what if he ends up playing til he's that old? It's not unheard of. And who cares if it is cap circumvention? The hard cap is a joke and big hockey markets like us suffer for it. f*** the cap. Good for the Devils to exploit this joke of a system.

The cap sucks anyways. Teams like ours that do their jobs to rake in the money get punished just for being a well-run organization.

We have contracts like this on our team. What's the big deal here? Kovalchuk will be out of the West the rest of his career. How can anyone complain about this?

lol what does this have to do with the fans being bandwagoners or not?

Will their fans still be considered bandwagoners if they still sell out this season? I mean realistically this is the worst their team will be for a while (on paper at least). So what happens if they still sell out?

lol

Huh? What does that have anything to do with a pun?

Uh, do you understand what a pun is?

I think part of the stipulation of matching an offersheet is that they can't trade Hjalmarsson for a year.

Please tell me you didn't purposely leave Halak, Rinne, and Anderson off the list just to squeeze Howard in there....

Good post. I think Chicago missing the playoffs is just wishful thinking. We'll probably take the central this year but with some of the prospects they stocked up on I think the next several years will be pretty interesting. I'm sure the $4m in bonus money comes off their cap hit for next year so they'll probably use that to sign Seabrook long term and anybody else who needs raises, plus whatever money the cap might rise by.

So why a 2 year deal?

I guess it's only natural. If the best team to come along in 49 years was ripped apart for the following season I'd be clinging to every glimmer of hope too.

I guess I perceive it another way then. To me all he did was take the starting position away from a guy who was so bad and overpaid that he's getting demoted to the minors next year. And they HAD to ride him going into the playoffs because they were already cap crunched as it was and couldn't afford to bring in anyone else. And you could also argue that the fans might think that with retaining Hjalmarsson they have most of their dominant defense back that will cover whatever rookie goalie's ass that the bring in, just like the defense did for Niemi as a rookie this past year. Either way the arbiter would be crazy to award an unproven goalie that played on a stacked team several million. If the arbiter says he's worth more than $2m tops it would be facepalm worthy.

What do you think he deserves? Throughout the playoffs we were all laughing at how bad he was and now he's suddenly worth something? The guy played half a season and then had an average at best playoff performance. I think Chicago would be dumb to bring him back at all for more than what Harding made. If arbitration awards him more than $2m I'll crack up...and then laugh harder if Chicago pays it.

No Lundqvist? Just goes to show how underrated and under appreciated Lundqvist is. I'd say the guy is easily top 3 in the league but everybody forgets about him because the rest of the team brings him down.

This was the only funny one. Kind of disappointed.

HF was just who mentioned he only played half a season. I checked NHL.com and they have him listed at 39 regular season games. Validity returned!

They won't be forced to do anything. If he wants too much then they'll let him walk and he'll try the open market. I think the guy will probably get a rude awakening though. I mean we all saw what a pitiful finals performance he had and he's kidding himself if he thinks he wasn't a product of the team in front of him. The FA goalie situation is already flooded with proven goalies and over at HF they were talking about how the guy has played like half a season. If he thinks he's getting Halak money he's dreaming.

What should they have done differently last year? Nothing much could've been done last summer except to fire the guy responsible for screwing up their QOs and signing Campbell and Huet to those hilarious contracts...which they did. So far Bowman has pretty much done his job of keeping their core together. Everybody else is expendable apparently.