sibiriak

Doesn't he still owe Nashville a couple of years of the contract he broke?

He will never dangle around Kovalchuk or Radulov. They can never be found in their defensive zone

St Petersburg and Ekaterinburg are in different conferences, so they won't play each other more than 3-4 times a year. If his daughter lives with her mother as a primary custody parent, she will have to get her permission to move within Russia as well as without.. If they wanted to, they could come to the US any time, because I'm certain both his 1st wife and daughter are US permanent residents and don't need a visa to visit. So, IMO, living in St Petersburg is only very marginally more convenient to communicate with someone in Ekaterinburg, than living in Detroit. So if Pavel ends up in any KL team but Ekaterinburg, yes I would say that he lied about the whole daughter thing.

According to a Russian media site Life78, Datsyuk is going to play for SKA St Petersburg. If true, this is sad news for me. SKA is probably the richest KHL team, that has the largest Russian oil and gas monopoly Gazprom for a sponsor. It is also almost 1400 miles away from Ekaterinburg where Datsyuk's daughter lives. In contrast, Datsyuk's hometown team Automobilist Ekaterinburg, can't afford to play Datsyuk anything close to what SKA can offer. If he chooses the money and plays for SKA, then all the talk about wanting to be closer to his kid is so much bull..t. If he's going to talk to her on the phone anyway, he can do that just as well or better from the US. If Pavel ends up playing for one of the rich St Petersburg or Moscow teams, I will have lost a lot of respect for him. I really hope that this piece of news is untrue.

Thanks! Why 90?

Which is 3 years from now. I haven't seen that 35 yo rule before, do you have a link? I am not doubting your word, just would like to learn more about it.

OV is 30 years old. He is NOT going to play until he is 46.

To sign Kovy, any NHL team would have to get unanimous consent from all the other 29 teams, which is not possible. Or, he will have to sit out a year from ANY pro hockey anywhere, and then only NJ Devils would have to consent. In other words, at his age, he is not going to sit out a year to come back to the NHL.

No coach, especially a rookie coach with a couple of month of total head coaching experience, can afford the luxury of benching his biggest star for the playoffs. If Sergei Zubiv did it, he HAD to. So far it has worked for him, they won their first round matchup without Kovalchuk. But if they lose, the coaches decision WILL be held against him and probably prove fatal for his job prospects.

I don't know if there was any conflict in the locker room or with the coaching staff. It could be just reaction to uninspired play, a signal to the rwest of the team, like I said.

To be fair, SKA St Peterburg has plenty of star players who aren't performing as they should. The coach couldn't bench all of them. So he benched the captain to send his team a message. Of course, Kovalchuk's play in the first game of this year playoffs made that decision easy. But saying "good riddance" to Kovy based on this one episode is premature at best. After all, just last year he was the KHL playoff MVP.

Actually, it looks like they are going for 3 3-men units (2 F 1 D) so each will get 6-7 min of ice time. 13-15 min if they play in 2 games. Hardly anything new for these guys, they all probably log 18+ min per game normally. In other news, next year ASG will feature basketball on ice.

I listened to that interview in its entirety. Fetisov did not say this.

I keep trying to convey to you that under Russian labor law (originally written in the 1970s) there's no such thing as a RFA. Any employee can terminate any labor contract on his own initiative by giving the employer a 2 weeks notice. After that, legally, they become a UFA, and any NHL club can sign such a player because he is free from any contract obligations under Russia's own labor laws. So your scenario is meaningless from KHL standpoint. That is what Fetisov is trying to change.

Even the densest Russian hockey officials understand by now that if a Russian kid got drafted in top 5, or even top 40, he WILL be going to the NHL. Whatever they do. See Malkin, Eugeny, as an example.They can choose to burn bridges with him, or give their blessing and have him play for there national team and perhaps return to the KHL in the future. This idea that top players can be kept in Russia has been dead for at least a decade now. The current concern is that a lot of young prospects go to NA before they are ready, play in juniors and AHL, but very few make it to the NHL. So an ideal state of affairs from Russian standpoint would have been for the players to go to NHL after they mature, and incidentally, after they played a few years for the club that paid for their development costs and the club had a chance to make back that investment. That age would be somewhere between 25 and 28. How to get to this ideal is ... unclear, to put it mildly.

That's ancient history. One might as well wish for the return of the "red machine" of the 70s and 80s. Those days are GONE, and no one in Russia really wants them back. Even Putin and Co.

Nah, only a few notable players actually left, and some of them will probably come back after not making the NHL rosters. Panarin, Tikhonov, couple of D-men from Ak Bars, perhaps Plotnikov would be the only "top talents" that left. The rest were young players who were playing in the junior league or 5-6 min/game for their KHL clubs.

That is not the loophole. The loophole that Fetisov is trying to close is that any Russian hockey player., according to the Russian labor law, can become a UFA on his say-so at any time with 2 weeks notice.

I am not sure I undrstand the need to keep Russian players in Russia. For the development of the top talent NHL is preferable, so the Russian national team gets better players. Let's face it, every single attempt to win anything internationally using KHL-based lineup failed miserably. So keeping top players in Russia where the national team coach can spend more time with them hasn't proved of much use. US and Canada bring quite competitive teams to every World Championship, using NHL based lineup that hasn't had the opportunity to train together much, but that doesn't seem to affect them. If the reason is to give home fans the opportunity to see their favorite players, this doesn't seem to make much difference to Novokuznetsk, Nizhnekamsk, Togliatti, Novosibirsk etc. fans, who will only see their best players on TV after they bolt to the few richest KHL clubs. Does it really make much difference to Sibir Novosibirsk fans if Tarasenko wears St Louis uni, or Dinamo Moscow uni on their TV screen?

1. They have NOT closed "that 2 week notice loophole". 2. Given that fact, no multi-year personal services contract in Russia is worth the paper it's written on. 3. There's a memorandum of understanding between the NHL and the KHL that prohibits signing the players "on active contract" in another league. That does NOT mean the RFAs, IIRC. 4. Given that fact, Fetisov is perfectly correct in saying that the Russian clubs (that, unlike the NHL clubs, actually bear the lion share of the expenses for training and development of the players from 13 years on) need some way to protect their investment. 5. And so he proposes amending the law, so a multi-year contract would actually be binding on both sides, not just the team. If you watch the actual interview, Fetisov's words were taken out of context. He was talking about Panarin, who left for Chicago at 23 years old. And Fetisov said that this is bad for Russian hockey and rules need to be changed so young players wouldn't become unrestricted free agents until 27 or 28 (just like in the NHL). Instead they made it sound like he wants to introduce some kind of serfdom for the Russian hockey players. He didn't say anything like that.

Your link refers to the same one referenced earlier in this thread. Actually, Fetisov didn't say what you think he did. See my comment right before your post.

Whichever side of the border he ended up at (and if he was arrested by the mounties, he must have been in Canada) he will not be able to travel to and from United States. Which is a significant hardship for an NHL player. So that would probably be the basis for Kings' terminating his contract, since he can't travel normally with the team. Convinient for them, but probably justified, so the NHLPA may not be able to reverse the contract termination.

Once one is caught with illegal drugs at the border, US ICE officials typically refuse to admit such a person to the US in the future and they don't need a formal reason, such as a criminal conviction, to refuse entry.

So a "material breach of contract" is that he no longer is allowed to cross US-Canada border?