Any big event of any kind will be seized upon by a bunch of people as an excuse to act like assholes.

People are just an awful species.

The arbitrator sides with the NHL and declares Kovalchuk's contract void. Whither now for him? KHL? Somewhere else with lots of cap room?

(I was very surprised to see this make the Sky Sports News ticker this morning, along with the re-signing of Teemu Selanne. That's like reading cricket scores on TSN)

I don't think the KHL is on. I've heard his wife likes bright lights and big cities. St Petersburg doesn't cut that way in comparison to NY or LA. I don't really have a clue but probably the Devils will reformat their offer, or the Kings — who were close last time — will snap him up. I kind of hope it's the latter as it'll add a bit more interest to the season out here.

I'm with Amor on that as well.

The current atmospheric conditions in Moscow cannot be helping KHL recruiting, either (as a reacent WSC Daily piece noted, it's the primary stumbling block over Aiden McGeady's agreeing to move to Spartak Moscow)

The plot thickens.

The NHL are reviewing both Luongo's deal with the Canucks and Mark Savard's extension with the Bruins.

While I support their action on Kovalchuk, it seems to me that any retroactive application of the "Kovalchuk Principle" would be a terrible idea, and of questionable legality.

It seems unlikely doesn't it. Then again the NHL like spending their money on litigation.

A lot of Canucks fans think this is a massive Get Out of Jail Free card of course. But I suspect it would cause a good deal of unpredictable disruption first.

True in all respects.

Evidently, the Hossa and Pronger contracts are also under review.

We need moitie/moonlight's take, but he is probably in the mountains enjoying life.

I saw that on the GSHC forum, interesting news for Fribourg although he would probably have gone for Geneva if the club was looking for a goalie.

So Sportsnet claim the following is the new Devils attempt at Kovalchuk's contract:

2010-11: $6m
2011-12: $6m
2012-13: $11m
2013-14: $11.3m
2014-15: $11.3m
2015-16: $11.6m
2016-17: $11.8m
2017-18: $10m
2018-19: $7m (36 years old at this point)
2019-20: $4m
2020-21: $1m
2021-22: $1m
2022-23: $1m
2023-24: $3m
2024-25: $4m

Average cap hit of $6.66m (someone having a bit of fun there). Still doesn't really pass the smell test does it?

I don't know when Nick Kypreos suddenly turned into the guy who breaks stories, but he is claiming on twitter that Antti Niemi is off to San Jose.

If the offer sheet to Hjalmarsson was to effectively force Niemi out of Chicago, Doug Wilson has been very wily/sneaky* indeed. At $2m a year, thats what Chicago offered him in the first place, though. If I was Niemi, I might think about getting myself a new agent.

*delete according to cheering preferences

I'd be very wary of the source, but the NHL tells the PA to accept our new rules for long term contracts, or contracts will be voided. Including one Roberto Luongo.

Fading separatist party has nothing better to do than criticize the habs for not being francophone enough.

Is it me, or are there just not as many good Quebec hockey players anymore? I get the felling that if you did an analysis of Team Canada over time, you'd find a decreasing proportion of them are from Quebec.

I think possibly so.

Ignoring the IIHF world championships (given most of the best players would still be in the NHL playoffs), in the modern era there seem to be fewer. There were four in the 2010 Olympic squad; Luongo, Brodeur, Fleury and Bergeron (who was essentially a bit part player anyway).

2006: five (Brodeur, Luongo, Lecavalier, St. Louis and Gagne).

2002: three (Brodeur, Gagne and Lemieux).

1998: three (Bourque, Desjardins, Roy).

But then going back through the old Canada Cups/World Cups, there aren't all that many more. Only when you get to the era of the Habs preeminence in the 70s do you start to approach double figures.

Edit: This is interesting reading, suggesting the number of Quebec born players is only slightly declining in number drafted by NHL sides. How many of them actually become superstars seems to be a moot point.

Edit 2: fixed broken link

Another interesting trend is that rise of Quebecois goalies (where would you be without them, eh?) parallels the decline of the "traditional" "flying Frenchmen".

Edit:

I found this!

www.quanthockey.com/TS/TS_PlayerNationalities.php

www.quanthockey.com/TS/TS_CanadianPlayers.php

and this

habsanalytics.wordpress.com/2010/07/24/q...-montreal-canadiens/

But I haven't found numbers, other than that graph, showing the portion of Quebec players as a percentage of Canadians in the league. The graph suggests there's been a drop off lately but not much and nothing that looks like a long-term trend.

There are lamentations about the drop of the percentage of Quebec players in the league and for the Canadiens, but the proportion of the league that is Canadian has dropped a lot in the past 30 years as more Europeans and Americans, er, Unitestatesians, have entered the league and the league has grown. So if the proportion of Canadian's has dropped, the proportion of French Canadians almost certainly has to drop too, right?

That's not because Canadian hockey has gotten worse, but because American hockey has gotten so much better while Europeans are, if not better as a whole, at least a lot better prepared for the NHL style than they once were, not to mention the influx of Eastern Europeans after the Wall fell. Canadians were once over 90% of the league. There was nowhere to go but down. Based on the population of the country, they're still vastly overrepresented in the NHL and even if you just looked at youth participation numbers, I suspect a Canadian kid playing hockey is, just based on that variable alone, more likely to make it to the NHL than an American, although that gap is closing.


Also, I'd venture a guess that Europeans are "overrepresented" among the stars, however defined, while Americans are underrepresented in that group with Canadians being about average. A lot of European guys who could be third or fourth line bucket-carriers prefer to play in Europe, while not many Americans would go elsewhere if they could get a spot, any spot, on an NHL team.

But "stars," which can be defined lots of ways but selection to an Team Canada is a pretty good one, is such a small sample that it's hard to know if the provincial breakdown really means anything. Two guys here or there could look like a big percentage swing, but not really show anything about the state of the game in that province.


An interesting geographic anomaly. Minnesota has produced by far the most US-born NHLers. But Wisconsin, which seems very similar to Minnesota in so many ways and has roughly the same population has produced only about one 8th as many NHL players. Wisconsin has no NHL team and only one DI college team - which gets most of its players from Minnesota - while Minnesota has four DI programs, three of which are at schools that aren't D1 in anything else.

For donkey's years Les Canadiens tended to sign as many French speaking prospects to 'C' forms as they could. This goes back to the days of the Maroons rivalry when the NHL decided it would be good business to have a team for each of the two solitudes in the city. Also, given that Ontario and Québec had a higher percentage of Canada's population than today it's not really surprising that the proportion of French speaking players is in decline. Especially when measured against the numbers a couple of generations back.

Reed, I think that the Wisconsin/Minnesota divide can be traced back to the fact that Wisconsin is dominated by Germans, while Minnesota is dominated by Scandinavians.

The Dakotas are essentially uninhabited, but there were Scandinavians in ND, and they have always been a power.

Given that Ontario and Québec also had a higher percentage of Canada's population than today it's not really surprising that the proportion of French speaking players is in decline. Especially when measured against the numbers a couple of generations back.

That's the part I wasn't sure about.

The chart I linked suggested that the number of players from British Columbia has grown, but Manitoba has dropped off a bit. Does that track overall population shifts?

The Maritimes don't seem to produce many players, with the notable exceptions of Crosby and Al Macinnis, I think. Is that just because there aren't many people there or something else?


Reed, I think that the Wisconsin/Minnesota divide can be traced back to the fact that Wisconsin is dominated by Germans, while Minnesota is dominated by Scandinavians.

The Dakotas are essentially uninhabited, but there were Scandinavians in ND, and they have always been a power.

That's an interesting hypothesis. But hockey as we know it wasn't really invented until after most of those people had immigrated. Or maybe that doesn't matter because they came to the US familiar with ice skating and perhaps some kind of shinny game.

The University of North Dakota is a power in college hockey, and it's certainly a big deal in Grand Forks, but most of their players are from Minnesota or Alberta. There just aren't enough people in North Dakota to produce more than a few D1 hockey players in a given year.