So let me make sure I’ve got this straight.

Ilya Kovalchuk wants a shit-ton of money to play hockey in the NHL. He’s pretty good. If anyone deserves a shit-ton of money in the NHL, it’s probably him.

The New Jersey Devils have a shit-ton of money to give him. Hooray!

Problem: all NHL teams have an annual salary cap. The total amount of the salaries they pay to their players has to be somewhere under $56M US (ish). Kovalchuk wants $11M a year. That would blow any team’s cap out of the proverbial (frozen) water. But there’s a little wiggle room, because contracts are averaged out over the duration of the contract – so if you pay someone $10M one year, then $5M the next, the average salary hit is $7.5M. So, solution: Sign him to an improbably long (17 year) contract with the annual payouts on a bell curve, so that he gets his shit-ton of money now and lots less later, averaging out to a workable ($6M) annual salary cap hit for the Devils.

Difficulty: Does anybody really believe that 27-year-old Ilya Kovalchuk will play NHL hockey for the next 17 years? Aren’t most players permanently on the golf course or the coach’s bench by the time they’re 38 or so? My 1-year-old daughter will be old enough to drink (in Quebec, but we’re talking hockey here, so) by the time this contract is up. Who really believes that nearly anyone in the NHL today will still be on the ice? (And if any of them are and they go in to the bar and hit on my daughter I will kneecap them, dirty old men. Oh wait. Tangent.)

Kovalchuck fistbumps for the mega-millions.

The NHL sees this tactic for what it is – complete horseshit and a flagrant end run around the salary cap rules – and, with an incredulous “I don’t fucking think so,” chucked out the first version that paid Kovalchuk $11M in the next few years and less than half a million the last few years. Now, they’re reviewing a new version of the contract, with a 15 year duration and a wee bit more money at the end of the contract rather than 90 percent of it in the first 10 years.

But the real problem is mine: I am seriously not sure who I should be snarking on here.

Do I snark the New Jersey Devils, for offering an NHL hockey player a 17 year contract – taking him through his 44th birthday – with a straight face?

Do I snark Kovalchuk himself, for reportedly threatening to take his puck and flee to Russia? Which, HA. He’s being offered a shit-ton of money. If he has to take slightly less than a shit-ton, then perhaps he should smile and say, thank you very much, team! instead of threatening to flee to …. RUSSIA. Seriously. What is he going to do in Russia that will be so much better than taking home $11M a year as an NHL player? Hunt bears? Drink vodka? Probably, because I’d imagine he’ll need lot of vodka when he realizes exactly how much goddamn money he left on the table.

This whole “contract” is nothing short of obnoxious. It’s certainly a clever way of getting around the salary cap, by frontloading the thing so much that he’s earning 90 percent or thereabouts of the cash in the first 10 years, with the rest of the money trickling in just like Kovalchuk’s pee as he tries to empty his bladder in the old folks’ home before going in to “practice” in the last few years of this deal while everyone in the rink snickers up their sleeves at the old guy who pulled a fast one on the league way back when.

As much as I despise Bettman, he’s right. These contracts are lunacy and bad faith. If Kovalchuk wants to leave town because he can only get $8M a year as compared to $11M, I won’t shed a tear. We’ll miss his goals, but we won’t miss his sense of entitlement.

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