KOV-ER TIME: Coach Pete DeBoer and the Devils have to get used to life without Ilya Kovalchuk, who bolted the team last week. (Getty Images)
First came the shock, then the disappointment, and then Pete DeBoer decided to move on.
The Devils coach was dealt one of the cruelest of blows last Thursday when his best player, Ilya Kovalchuk, decided to leave in the prime of his career to play in his native Russia. Signing his voluntary retirement papers, the 30-year-old right wing burned $77 million and 12 years of contract with the Devils, leaving a sour taste in everyone’s mouth but his own.
Yesterday, at the first day of the Devils’ prospect camp in Newark, DeBoer was as candid as always in addressing the situation publicly for the first time.
“Of course [it is] disappointing,” DeBoer said about losing the player who led all NHL forwards in ice time over the past three years. “It’s tough to express, but when something comes at you like that from left field, it’s something you don’t even consider as an option. When it hits you, it’s obviously disappointing, but you catch your breath for a day and then get ready to move forward.”
It was announced yesterday Kovalchuk signed a four-year deal with SKA St. Petersburg for what has been reported as between $15 million and $20 million per year. For the Devils organization and their fans, betrayal is a word not too far from their lips, although DeBoer won’t go quite that far.
“I don’t feel that way,” DeBoer said. “Maybe I should, but I don’t. I enjoyed working with him, he was a good pro, he was a good teammate in the dressing room and he’ll be missed. That’s my feelings on it.
“I don’t go any deeper than that. Everybody has a personal life and personal decisions regarding their career and it’s not my place to be stepping into those.”
DeBoer said he had some discussion with president and general manager Lou Lamoriello about the possibility of Kovalchuk returning to Russia, where he played during the lockout and where he stayed during the first three days of the Devils’ abbreviated training camp, participating in the KHL’s All-Star game.
Yet when Kovalchuk returned, DeBoer said he didn’t get any sense the veteran right wing was still thinking about it going home, or that he wasn’t giving it his all for the Devils.
“From what I’ve read, after the lockout, this was in the back of his head,” DeBoer said. “But I never saw it at ground zero. On a day-to-day basis I thought he came and worked and was a good teammate.”
Now DeBoer has a very different team on his hands than the one that made it to the Stanley Cup finals just two years ago. He no longer has Kovalchuk or Zach Parise, but has added recent free-agent signings Ryane Clowe, Michael Ryder and Rostislav Olesz.
“There’s no hiding the fact it’s a big hole,” DeBoer said of losing Kovalchuk. “It’s a big ice-time hole, specialty teams, five-on-five. He’s one of the best players in the world, so there’s a hole there and we have to find a way as a group to fill it.”
Yet DeBoer is wise enough to know expectations around the organization haven’t changed.
“You know my boss,” he said, referring to Lamoriello. “There’s no taking your foot off the gas, because some of these things happen.”