Kings say no again to Ilya Kovalchuk – latimes.com
“We really would love to add Kovi to our team, but not at the cost of our good young players,” Tim Leiweke, the Kings‘ governor and chief executive of parent company AEG, said Wednesday night. “Dean is trying here, but we know what we need in cap space going forward to keep our nucleus together. We can’t let one guy throw us into panic in a year or two. It is not about cash. It is about cap.”
So I will assume from this and other bits of the Helene Elliott article from which the above is clipped, that Kovalchuk has not come down in his cap hit request/demand.
There is also a report from the NY Post that the Devils have offered $100MM to Kovy, without mentioning the term of the deal. The Devils (if they stretch themselves to the breaking point, spend their bonus cushion and the 10% summer cap increase) can afford to spend almost exactly $10MM, but would then immediately have to start dumping salary, about $5.94MM worth. They would have until the last day of training camp/preseason to get down below the cap.
Frankly, I think it would be weird for the Devils to offer Kovalchuk $10MM a year, since it would mean dumping at least $6MM in salary, more like $7MM unless they are willing to blow through their bonus cushion. But maybe they really, really want him.