MAYBE someone can provide one good reason for Alex Ovechkin to sign a new contract with the before becoming a restricted free agent on July 1, because we sure can’t think of any.
Ovechkin, stuck in a hockey market in DC that’s as irrelevant now as it was before the lockout and therefore denied a suitable stage to showcase his brilliance, isn’t going to make more money by signing with the Caps than he would by inviting offer sheets this summer.
Even if owner Ted Leonsis tries to make him the NHL’s highest-paid player by offering a max contract of $10.3 million per season, the value of a max contract – 20 percent of the cap – will rise this summer in direct proportion to the anticipated 7-to-10-percent cap increase for 2008-09.
Honestly, if Kevin Lowe believed Thomas Vanek to be worth four first-round draft picks last summer, any number of GMs with cap space to accommodate an annual hit of up to $10M per surely will feel the same way about the dynamic 22-year-old Ovechkin. He has registered 112 goals and 221 points in his first 184 NHL games.
Memo to Brian Burke and all those who would howl at the thought of rival teams “poaching” another club’s marquee player: Ovechkin does not belong to the Caps. Through no desire of his own, he merely is playing for Washington under a three-year, entry-level capped lease that will expire at the end of this season. He never chose to play in DC so much as he chose to play in the NHL rather than remain in Russia after the lockout.
The Caps did nothing to earn Ovechkin other than being lousy in 2003-04 before then winning the Draft lottery to leapfrog both the 29th-overall Blackhawks and 30th-overall Penguins. That got them the first pick in what has become essentially a two-player draft, with Evgeni Malkin going second to Pittsburgh.
The NHL surely would never admit such a thing, but getting Ovechkin into a marquee hockey market would benefit a league that’s most identifiable now by a combination of cap-imposed mediocrity in the guise of parity and the absence of super teams.
The Caps have averaged 74.2-percent capacity this season, the third-worst mark in the league behind Florida and Chicago. They’re one of six teams in the NHL under 80 percent capacity thus far, one of 13 under 90 percent in a gate-receipts league.
Hard Cap utopia, anyone?
There’s a new coach in Washington after two years of regressing under Glen Hanlon, and the guess is there will be a new GM, too, by the end of the season if George McPhee’s team doesn’t show marked progress between now and the end of the year.
Amid all this uncertainty and performing in a backwater hockey room with talents designed for the big stage, why would Ovechkin commit now to remaining in Washington?
Sinatra left Hoboken, didn’t he?
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Dialogue has resumed between Scotty Bowman and the board of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment aimed at working out a deal so the nine-time Cup-winning coach and one-time player personnel director would become the Toronto club’s president and director of hockey operations, Slap Shots has been told.
His contributions to ending the drought are too often overlooked, but when 37-year-old defenseman Sergei Zubov skates with the Stars against the Rangers this afternoon at the Garden, the challenge is to name a more potent NHL power-play point combination since the 1967-68 expansion, than Zubov and Brian Leetch.
Pat Burns looks great and says he feels great. Presuming Burns, a cancer survivor, would receive permission from his doctors to return to the grind of NHL coaching, which GM is going to make himself look very, very smart by offering the Devils’ 2003 Cup-winner a job?
NHLPA executive director Paul Kelly, nearly one-third of the way through his initial fall tour through the league, has accepted Gary Bettman‘s invitation to address the Board of Governors this week at their meeting in California. The commissioner and Kelly met for a few hours in New York at the beginning of the month where the men exchanged views on both the state of the game and the state of the industry.
It was a beautiful ceremony in Montreal on Monday when Larry Robinson‘s No. 19 was retired. But we’re told the Canadiens have been fined for the 44-minute length of the festivities – at which Lou Lamoriello paid homage to the Bleu, Blanc et Rouge as the evening’s featured speaker – that pushed the opening faceoff back past its posted scheduled time.
In other words, just say, “thank you” on Jan. 24, Leetchie.