Turns out the NHL wasn’t allowing its players to participate in the Olympics without at least the smallest bit of protection.
According to multiple sources, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) had taken out insurance for the possibility of NHL players getting hurt while playing for their respective countries, The Post has learned. Yet that insurance was not applicable until the injured player had missed 10 games for his NHL team.
Every NHL team pays insurance on each player contract, meaning if the player were to get hurt playing for that team, the insurance would pick up most of, if not all, of the salary. Yet, if a player were to get hurt participating for some other team — such as his country in the Olympics — then the insurance taken out by the team does not take effect.
That led many to believe that NHL teams were taking all of the risk sending their players to Sochi, Russia, with the IOC and IIHF reaping all the benefits. Yet NHL officials publicly had stated after the Games the IOC did have insurance, and by refusing to get into specifics, led many more people to believe NHL teams were covered entirely.
What actually happened was a tense negotiation, with the NHL and NHLPA on one side and the IOC and IIHF on the other, concerning the league’s participation in the 2014 Sochi Games. It was not resolved until July, well after the most recent collective bargaining agreement was reached in January 2013 between the NHL and its players. Part of that Olympic negotiation was to guard against NHL players suffering long-term injury while playing for their countries, and this 10-game provision was seemingly the solution.
Knowing the players desperately wanted to participate in the Games, the NHL had very little leverage in trying to get the IOC to take out full insurance, and the compromise was this 10-game space during which the league’s teams took on all of the risk.
It certainly irked many team executives, including Islanders general manager Garth Snow, when he publicly vented after his star player, John Tavares, suffered a season-ending knee injury while playing for Team Canada.
“It’s a joke,” Snow told Newsday the day after Tavares tore the MCL and meniscus in his left knee in a group-stage game against Latvia. “They want all the benefits from NHL players in Olympics and don’t want to pay when our best player gets hurt.”
The result for Snow and his cash-strapped organization is they are left on the hook for approximately $609,756 of Tavares’ remaining $1.341 million owed this season on his $5 million contract. (He carries an annual $5.5 million salary-cap hit, and is signed for the next four seasons after this.)
With 22 games remaining, starting with Thursday night’s Coliseum match against the Maple Leafs, that means the IOC insurance will pick up the tab for the final 12 games, an approximate total of $731,707.
Beyond Tavares, the Red Wings lost captain Henrik Zetterberg, who suffered a herniated disk while playing for Sweden and likely will miss eight weeks. The Panthers lost Tomas Kopecky indefinitely after he suffered a concussion while playing for Slovakia, as well as talented 18-year-old forward Aleksander Barkov, out four-to-six weeks with a knee injury suffered while playing for Russia.
Then there are teams such as the Rangers, who lost forward Mats Zuccarello for just about two weeks to a broken hand, and will have to foot that bill out of pocket, and also the Blue Jackets, who lost defenseman Fedor Tyutin for two-to-three weeks with an ankle injury.
It leads to the question of the league’s possible participation in the 2018 Olympics, set to take place in Pyeongchang, South Korea, a 14-hour time difference from the east coast of North America.
“To stop the whole season for almost three weeks? I don’t know,” Rangers coach Alain Vigneault said Saturday about the future of NHL players in the Olympics. “Some great races going on, now a couple teams have lost some key players. … We’ll let the big boys decide that.”