Home Staff Brian Herman NHL Off-Season Review

NHL Off-Season Review

A few months ago the Chicago Blackhawks defeated the Philadelphia Flyers in an entertaining and energetic six games series to win the Stanley Cup. Since then there have been two major stories to the NHL offseason, the first being the salary cap related dismantling of the Chicago Blackhawks championship roster and the second being the Ilya Kovalchuk free agency saga.

The Blackhakws lost key players such as Antti Niemi, Kris Versteeg, Andrew Ladd, John Madden, and Dustin Byfuglien. The Hawks have filled these roster spots through trades and lower priced signings, but it will be interesting to see if they can maintain a high level of performance throughout the season. The Hawks still do have Patrick Kane, Marian Hossa, and Jonathon Toews along with other starters from their cup winning team so they still have great talent up front. The most important off-season acquisition that will go to deciding their success this season may be goaltender Marty Turco. Turco, now 35, left Dallas after 9 seasons in which he compiled a record of 262-191 with 26 ties (pre-lockout) with a career goals against average of 2.31 and save percentage of .911. Last year he had his least amount of games played since he became starting goaltender for Dallas and his least amount of wins. He will have a much better team playing in front of him in Chicago this year but it will be interesting to see if he can backstop the Hawks to a long playoff run.

NHL 2009-10 Highlights

Ilya Kovalchuk has resigned in New Jersey with the Devils to the tune of 15 years and $100 million. This was not without any drama. The original courtship of the Russian sniper was a battle between the Los Angeles Kings, New York Islanders, and the team he played the last third of the season for in 2010, the New Jersey Devils. While the Islanders had the cap space, they obviously did not have the type of team Kovalchuk wanted to join. For a while it seemed as though Ilya was heading to LA, but talks broke down enough times to give the Devils a few windows of opportunity to negotiate. Originally there was an agreement for a 17 year $102 million deal. The NHL rejected this contract because while the cap hit was only $6 million each year, the structure of the contract was front loaded which the league determined circumvented the collective bargaining agreement, and after an arbitration hearing, the ruling was upheld. In the end the league allowed the 15 year deal because of an agreement between the league and players association that changed the CBA to remove the cap circumvention of these long contracts. The Devils are $3 million over the cap and need to find a way to shed that money off of their roster, but they now have the leading goal scorer of the past decade, a move they feel will bring them a championship for the first time since 2002-2003.

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