Late last week, Kontinental Hockey League head Alexander Medvedev sat for an interesting and wide-ranging Q&A session with Jeff Klein and Stu Hackel of the New York Times. As I've noted before, while the KHL was launched with much fanfare last September, the league's inaugural season has been something of a bumpy ride. So while many of us might have seen the KHL as a legitimate competitor to the NHL on the international level in the run-up to this season, some recent events -- not the least of which was the in-game death of New York Rangers prospect Alexei Cherepanov and reported financial problems with a number of franchises -- have made us think a little harder of how much time and effort it will take before the league emerges as a rival to the NHL.
Still, Medvedev and his counterparts in the Russian hockey world are pressing on, determined that they deserve to have a seat at the table as equals with North America on wide variety of issues like player transfer agreements. But perhaps most important of all these days is continued NHL participation in the Winter Olympics.
Last Thursday, we ran a translation of a Sovetsky Sport interview with Washington Capitals winger Alex Ovechkin, where he expressed his distress that the NHL is waiting to address the issue of future Olympic participation until after the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. In terms of international hockey, the problem is fairly simple: without a player transfer agreement between North America and Europe, the NHL is prepared to use continued Olympic participation as a cudgel against the Russians with the 2014 Winter Games scheduled to be held in the Russian city of Sochi.
Keeping NHL players off the ice at Sochi would be a tremendous blow to Russian pride, so I guess it isn't much of a surprise that NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman is determined to use every last bit of that leverage to get a transfer agreement in place. The funny thing is, while Bettman wants to play hardball, the NHL Players Association, led by union head Paul Kelly, is determined that the league continue to participate. And as we noted in the piece last week concerning the Ovechkin interview, an ESPN poll of 193 NHL players found that better than 80 percent were in favor of shutting down the league for two weeks every four years to continue participating in the Winter Olympics.
So what's the forecast? For my money, we're probably looking at several years of covert negotiations and public standoffs that will make observers think of the heady days of the Cold War and international arms control agreements.
