NHL executives aren’t inclined to get wistful about what-might-have-beens, and certainly not those whose teams make the playoffs only once in a dozen seasons, but a mention of Ilya Kovalchuk induces sighs from Don Waddell, the Atlanta Thrashers’ general manager for their first 11 seasons in the Georgia capital.
“When we won the draft lottery in 2001, it felt like we’d won the Powerball lottery,” Waddell says. “Ilya walked in with the best release in the league, and he was one of the five best skaters right off the bat. And even at 18, he was a physical force, almost [6-foot-3], 220 pounds and still physically maturing.”
Kovalchuk’s career statistics are impressive enough (443 goals in 926 NHL regular-season games) but leave him out of Hockey Hall of Fame conversations. The great what-if underlying those numbers: Kovalchuk left the NHL for 5½ seasons in what would have been his prime to play in the KHL and lost another year to the lockout of 2004-05.
Kovalchuk has a varied career in the NHL. Here, he is suited up in 2019 to play with the Los Angeles Kings against his former team, the New Jersey Devils.Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
Setting aside statistics, Kovalchuk always looked the part of a game-changing force, in the same way that Eric Lindros did when he arrived on the scene.
“He was a monster skating against kids,” says Normand Poisson, who filed the first scouting report on Kovalchuk for the Thrashers at an under-17 tournament in January, 2000. “I just thought, ‘He’s going to make this game his.‘”
Waddell doesn’t balk when asked if Kovalchuk might have taken a run at Wayne Gretzky’s career goal-scoring record, the one Alexander Ovechkin has in his sights this spring.
Alexander Ovechkin breaks Wayne Gretzky’s all-time NHL goals record
“Kovalchuk had that kind of talent, but things worked against him and the stars didn’t line up,” he says. “Not to take anything away from Ovechkin – it’s amazing that he’s on 50-goal pace at [the age of] 39. What’s fair to say is that he and Ovechkin were very comparable talents, same position, same ability to wire the puck … [Kovalchuk is] far more appreciated by people inside the game than by fans.”
Nik Antropov, a former linemate of Kovalchuk with the Thrashers, takes it one step further.
“Ilya was more versatile than Ovechkin,” he says. “He could do anything Ovechkin could with skill or scoring – like Ovie, Ilya had a way of getting open just at the right time. [Kovalchuk] was a better skater though. Physically tough, could fight. He could do anything he wanted.”
There’s no knowing how Kovalchuk feels about the comparisons to Ovechkin or his own chances at Gretzky’s goal-scoring record – he didn’t reply to requests for an interview. And since he walked away from the game, last playing a handful of games with Spartak Moscow at the age of 40, he has kept a low profile – which seems to be his preferred mode.
If you were to ask casual hockey fans to name the Russian who as an 18-year-old rookie took a regular shift at the Olympics and would lead the NHL in goal scoring at 20, they’d likely land on the name of the most-discussed star in the news these days.
Fact is, Ovechkin did skate in the Olympics in his rookie season in the NHL, but he was already 20 when he made his debut at the Games. Though he would beat out Sidney Crosby for the Calder Trophy that year, he didn’t lead the NHL in goals. No, in the 2003-04 season, when Ovechkin was still a draft-eligible prospect, Kovalchuk scored 41 goals to earn a share of the Rocket Richard Trophy with Calgary’s Jarome Iginla and Columbus’s Rick Nash. Kovalchuk got a head start on Ovechkin and was out ahead of him in career scoring in their early 20s.
It wasn’t a case that Kovalchuk hit a wall either – with rule changes favourable to skill players coming out of the 2005 lockout, Kovalchuk scored 50 goals three times. Yet, those in the Thrashers organization believed he could rack up even bigger numbers if complementary talent had surrounded him.
“The Capitals got Nicklas Backstrom [in Ovechkin’s third season] and he was a perfect fit at centre,” says Dan Marr, the Thrashers’ director of scouting when they drafted Kovalchuk. “Later on, Washington got Evgeni Kuznetsov, another elite centre. We didn’t have anyone like those two for Ilya to play beside.”
That inability to land a strong supporting cast stunted Kovalchuk’s numbers and manifested in a Sisyphus-level futility on the ice and on the bottom line; In their dozen seasons in Atlanta, the Thrashers made the playoffs a single time, getting swept by the Rangers in 2007.
“The league didn’t do [the teams] that came with expansion back in the nineties any favours with the talent that was made available,” Waddell says. “Las Vegas and Seattle had a lot more to work with in their expansion draft and could be competitive coming out of the gate. We had a lot of ground to try to make up, but when we got Ilya we thought we had an important piece – the most important piece.”
Kovalchuk was with the Atlanta Thrashers for eight seasons, so far his longest stint with one team.Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images
With a lack of on-ice success and with ownership wanting to keep the payroll close to the league floor, Atlanta was neither a destination for free agents nor an organization that could hold on to established talent. Every attempt to place complementary pieces around Kovalchuk went sideways.
Dany Heatley, Atlanta’s second overall pick in 2000, joined the lineup with Kovalchuk at the start of the 2001-02 season, the pair being voted as finalists for the Calder Trophy – Heatley would wind up winning the award after Kovalchuk missed 17 games with a shoulder injury. They couldn’t work in tandem except for power-play situations, both being left wingers, but still, the pair represented a base to build on. They’d play less than 200 games in the same lineup, however – in 2003, Heatley crashed his Ferrari, an accident that killed his teammate Dan Snyder. After Heatley pleaded guilty to second-degree vehicular homicide and received probation, he asked to be traded.
Waddell made the best of a bad situation, sending Heatley to Ottawa and coming away with Marian Hossa, a future Hall of Famer, in return. No matter, Hossa wanted to move on not even two seasons in. And the Thrashers’ big win with Kovalchuk in 2001 wasn’t repeated at subsequent drafts – a few useful pieces, a few outright whiffs, nobody remotely elite.
Thus, it was surprising that Kovalchuk was for a long time committed to making it work in Atlanta.
“I can’t say a bad word about Ilya on that count,” Waddell says. “He wore an A and then became the captain and really embraced the role of a team leader. There were players who didn’t want to come to Atlanta or wanted to move on, but Ilya bought in.”
That might seem the most curious aspect of Kovalchuk’s time with the Thrashers: By the accounts of those in the organization, he didn’t mind playing for a team that was a distant fourth behind the NFL, MLB and NBA franchises. “I don’t think celebrity meant anything to him,” Waddell says. “Not that he was a hermit, but he liked to be able to leave the arena and be out of the spotlight.”
Kovalchuk’s move to New Jersey came with controversy as the NHL took issue with his salary agreement.Mike Segar/Reuters
Fame might not have interested Kovalchuk but an opportunity to win did. Set to become an unrestricted free agent in the summer of 2010, he asked the Thrashers to trade him to a contender. “Realistically, we didn’t have a shot [at re-signing him],” Waddell says. “There was no animosity. I didn’t begrudge him wanting a chance to win.”
Ahead of the deadline, the GM engineered a trade that landed Kovalchuk in New Jersey, a seismic deal that cost the Devils little in the way of capital on the ice (three journeymen players, one less-than-premium first-round draft pick and future considerations) but required an unprecedented financial commitment from the usually cautious GM Lou Lamoriello. The original contract that Lamoriello tendered and Kovalchuk signed in July, 2010 – a 17-year, US$102-million deal – was rejected by the NHL, which fined the Devils US$3-million and forfeited first- and third-round draft pick for an attempt to circumvent the salary cap. A later contract with adjusted terms, 15 years with a payout of US$100-million, received league approval.
Kovalchuk’s production fell off (seasons of 31 and 37 goals), but in 2012 he led New Jersey with eight goals on an unlikely run to the Stanley Cup final. It seemed like was settling in for a long, bountiful run, but he’d only play 37 more games for the Devils.
The first red flag: With the NHL locking out players at the start of 2012-13 season, Kovalchuk signed with St. Petersburg of the KHL. When a collective agreement was reached, he lingered with the KHL before reporting back to the Devils. After New Jersey missed the playoffs in the shortened season, Kovalchuk announced his retirement from the NHL at the age of 30, leaving behind more than US$11-million for the upcoming season and a total of US$77-million remaining on his contract. If reports were to be believed, the St. Petersburg owner was prepared to pay him US$15- to US$20-million on a multiyear front-loaded contract paying a fraction of the tax rate he’d have paid staying in the NHL.
“I thought I knew Ilya really well, but I never saw that coming,” says John Perpich, who was a pro scout with the Thrashers. “Especially after going to the final. Once he had a taste of winning and his contract, I thought he was [in New Jersey] for the long haul. I can’t see it just being about money – how much money did he really need?”
St. Petersburg reportedly offered Kovalchuk more money than what he would have made staying in the NHL.Alexander Nemenov/AFP/Getty Images
Kovalchuk’s exact motivations for walking away from the Devils remain unknown.
His agent at that point, Jay Grossman, did not reply to interview requests, probably still stinging a decade later from the loss of commissions on the $77-million of the Devils’ money that his client was leaving on the table when he filed retirement papers with the league.
Those who entertain the possibility of Kovalchuk breaking Gretzky’s record rather than Ovechkin suggest that KHL executives would have preferred to coax the Washington star into repatriating. Said one NHL agent: “It could have been Ovechkin who’d have done it first, if [Capitals] owner Ted Leonsis hadn’t pushed for George McPhee to extend [Ovechkin] – what was going to be five or six years [in 2008], became 13 and his mother told him to sign it, what turned out to be a very favourable deal for Washington with the direction salaries took in the market.”
Any overtures didn’t sway Ovechkin and so it was Kovalchuk who entered hockey exile. Said Bud Holloway, who played for Red Army against Kovalchuk’s St. Petersburg team: “He was scary, so much speed and skill, not like he lost anything [going to the KHL].”
Though Kovalchuk became the face of the KHL, he remained connected to the U.S., summering at his home on Fisher Island, across the bay from downtown Miami.
“I think Ilya felt he had unfinished business in the NHL,” says agent J.P. Barry, who also had a place on Fisher Island and wound up representing him. The idea that he’d make a return to the NHL became reality in the summer of 2018. After several teams talked with his representation he signed a three-year deal with Los Angeles.
For the first couple of months, Kovalchuk maintained point-a-game pace, but the Kings were woeful and with a change in coaching, his ice time was cut down to less than 12 minutes a game – he didn’t make it to Christmas of his second year before Los Angeles terminated his contract.
Kovalchuk plays for the Kings in late 2019 against Montreal, which would sign him a few months later.Eric Bolte/USA TODAY Sports via Reuters
In January he signed with Montreal, what Barry calls “the perfect fit for him.” It seemed fated when Kovalchuk scored overtime winners against Ottawa and Toronto, but before the deadline then-Montreal GM Marc Bergevin dealt him to Washington for draft picks.
“He wanted to keep playing but Montreal didn’t have any room under the salary cap and no one else did either,” Barry says. “It wasn’t the price point. The market was just too tight. So, he went back to the KHL.”
The arc of Kovalchuk’s career wound up being nothing like that the Atlanta Thrashers imagined when they called his name at the 2001 draft or when he led the league in goals in 2004.
“[Gretzky’s record] would have meant something to him,” Waddell says. “I remember when he came over before the draft and spoke almost no English, he knew all about the league, knew the players and had followed it, which would have been tough to do in Russia back before the internet. He wanted to be a part of it back then. I don’t know if he’d have any regrets other than wanting to play a few years more, but Ovechkin breaking the record would be something that would make him think.”
Waddell, now the president of hockey operations for the Columbus Blue Jackets, has been suppressing a sense of dread that he might be in the building to eyewitness the seemingly inevitable record-breaker. “I’ve had our home-and-home with the Capitals [April 12 and 13] circled on the calendar and thought that I hope he doesn’t get the big one against us,” Waddell says.
Kovalchuk and Ovechkin were teammates in Washington for one season before the former returned to Russia. Now, Ovechkin continues to play for the Capitals as he comes closer to Gretzky's historic record.Patrick Smith/Getty Images