Kariya Gets a Big Chunk of Magic Kingdom : Hockey: Mighty Ducks’ top pick of 1993 signs three-year contract worth $6.5 million.

Fourteen months after drafting the player they’d like to build their franchise around, the Mighty Ducks finally have Paul Kariya’s autograph after signing him to a three-year, $6.5-million contract late Wednesday night.

The deal, which pays $4.775 million in signing bonuses and a $575,000 annual salary, ends a saga so drawn-out and complicated that General Manager Jack Ferreira said weeks ago that when--and if--Kariya signed the newspaper headline should simply be: “Finally.”

Kariya was relieved, too, after completing a few details so he could sign Wednesday night. That avoided the uncertainties of a new standard NHL contract that went into effect Thursday--and perhaps the threat of a rookie salary cap that could result from ongoing collective-bargaining talks.

“I feel ecstatic,” said Kariya, 19, a former University of Maine player who starred for Canada in the Olympics and World Championships. “I’m really excited. At the same time I’m relieved the negotiating process is over and I finally get to play hockey.”

In the end, the Ducks made Kariya a very rich rookie by NHL standards, giving the fourth overall pick from the 1993 NHL draft a contract that will pay him an average of $2.166 million a year.

That’s more than second overall 1993 pick Chris Pronger, whose four-year, $7-million deal with Hartford is worth an average of $1.75 million a year. And it’s more than the Ducks’ second overall pick this year, defenseman Oleg Tverdovsky, made when he signed a three-year, $4.2-million contract paying an average of $1.4 million a year on Aug. 15.

In fact, it’s more than the Ducks implied they’d ever pay an unproven rookie, calling the contracts of Pronger and Ottawa’s Alexandre Daigle last year “aberrations.”

Instead, they signed Kariya to a contract equal to the deal signed by Peter Forsberg of Quebec, a former holdout who could be Kariya’s main rival for the Calder Trophy as rookie of the year this season. In fact, if Daigle’s five-year, $12.25-million contract ($2.45 million a year) is converted from Canadian to U.S. dollars, Kariya will actually average more, though his contract’s total value is dwarfed by Daigle’s.

The signing caps a summer spending spree for the Ducks, who had the NHL’s lowest payroll last season at $7.8 million but have spent nearly $13.5 million on draft picks this summer. In addition to Tverdovsky, they signed last year’s second- and third-round picks, Nikolai Tsulygin and Valeri Karpov.

“I think we proved we’re serious about improving our team,” Ferreira said. The Ducks won 33 games during their first season, sharing an NHL record number with Florida, but the team had the worst power play in the NHL and struggled offensively.

Ferreira said Kariya’s performance since the ’93 draft--at the time he was considered a skilled and imaginative playmaker who might be too small for the NHL--justified the contract.

“He has proved himself over and above anyone else in that draft,” Ferreira said. “Paul has really taken himself to a different level. He went to the Olympics and the World Championships, and at the World Championships he was playing among all those NHL players. He was (Canada’s) leading scorer and one of the outstanding players of the tournament.

“We feel we’ve gotten the two best players in the last two drafts. We got both of the players we rated No. 1. We rated Kariya No. 1 and we rated Tverdovsky No. 1.”

The Kariya negotiations didn’t start until after the Olympics, when the Ducks made an initial offer worth less than $1 million a year. They stalled this summer when agent Don Baizley began contending that if Kariya didn’t reach terms with the Ducks this year, he should become an unrestricted free agent next June. The reason: Under NHL rules, Kariya would be too old to return to the draft as most unsigned players do.

The Ducks were concerned that he had a point--and Ferreira admits “at times we questioned whether he really wanted to play here or not.”

The stalemate didn’t break until the Ducks met with Kariya and Baizley last week, then upped their original offer by more than a million and told them it would be their last proposal.

Those numbers eliminated the free-agency issue.

Kariya insists he was never “anti-Anaheim.”

“It’s always been in the back of my mind that I’d eventually be a Mighty Duck,” he said. “In the back of my mind, Anaheim was the only one I wanted.”

Hardly had the ink dried on the contract before the Ducks began to try to control expectations.

“We’re not expecting him to come in and carry us immediately,” Ferreira said. “Eventually, though, he probably will be a cornerstone of this franchise.”

Said club president Tony Tavares: “We respect Paul, but he’s a piece of a puzzle as opposed to the entire puzzle. I don’t want people getting their expectation level to where they expect a 19-year-old guy to score 50 goals and have 70 assists. He still has to make the adjustment.”

Coach Ron Wilson is delighted to add Kariya to a team whose offense last year was best described as ugly duckling.

“We just didn’t have the ability to do a lot of things creative offensively last year,” he said. “Now we’ve got people with the creativity and imagination to create things, and we need to finish off the chances they create. I wasn’t disappointed in our shots on goal, just our ability to finish them off.”

He envisions Kariya, a winger in the NHL, playing with center Anatoli Semenov, another skillful playmaker, with either another skilled player such as Garry Valk or Valeri Karpov on the wing or a tough guy such as Todd Ewen or Stu Grimson.

Will those players accept a teen-ager who makes more than they do? Kariya at least has a foot in the door after rooming with defenseman Bobby Dollas at the World Championships.

“I was pretty skeptical when I went there,” Dollas said. “I said, ‘Let’s see what this kid’s all about.’ ”

And he quickly did.

“He sees a lot of things on the ice other people don’t see,” Dollas said. “He sees gaps and openings. He was one of our best players, and that’s kind of good, considering he was the lowest-paid player on (the Canadian) team--at that time.”

Dollas was himself a first-round pick in 1983, when Winnipeg drafted him 14th overall. He made about $130,000 that year, but he thinks Kariya’s personality will help him get along.

“I do expect him to take us out to dinner,” Dollas said.