Cold War Heats Up in the NHL

Clandestine defections were supposed to be gone with the Berlin Wall.

But last week, 19-year-old Nikolai Zherdev, the Columbus Blue Jackets’ first-round draft pick in 2003, secretly left his Russian club, CSKA, and flew to Canada.

His CSKA coach, the legendary Viktor Tikhonov, and CSKA vice president Valeri Gushin say Zherdev is fleeing his army obligations. The NHL says there’s no proof Zherdev is an army conscript. One source says he was not carrying a military passport, which proves he was not in the army.

But none of this is about military obligations. It’s about money. It’s about Russia trying to stop the NHL from poaching its young stars. And it’s about flexing muscles.

“It’s a power play, remnant from the Cold War,” says John Sanful, author of Russian Revolution: Exodus to the NHL.

The NHL takes some of Russia’s best players and pays a transfer fee stipulated in an agreement between the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) and the NHL. Each NHL team pays the IIHF $300,000 per season. The IIHF distributes that money among its member nations. In addition, when an NHL team takes a player, it gives $100,000 to his former team. Russia is dissatisfied with this agreement, which gives it so little for developing these stars. The issue is not new. And when it comes to Zherdev, the Blue Jackets are up against a couple of veterans of this power play.

“The fascinating thing is that it’s 2003, and 12 or 13 years ago we were talking about Sergei Fedorov coming over and talking about the same team (CSKA) and the same people,” Sanful says. “It just shows you the more things have changed, the more they stay the same.”

The Russian Hockey Federation can ask the IIHF for an arbitration hearing on Zherdev. Russian officials would have to prove that Zherdev fled his military obligations. If they could, he would be ineligible to play in the NHL until those obligations are met.

According to the Russian news agency TASS, the president of the Russian Hockey Federation says the military issue is secondary to the fact the NHL broke an agreement that a player cannot join the league after playing for his club team in the same season.

Consider Zherdev’s case, as well as similar difficulties encountered by Stanislav Chistov and Alexander Svitov in recent years, a warning shot. The agreement between the IIHF and NHL expires after this season, and Russia is threatening not to be part of the next one. Transfer fees then would have to be worked out with the individual Russian clubs and could reach astronomical levels, much as they have in European soccer.

How much could Moscow Dynamo ask for Alexander Ovechkin, who will be drafted No. 1 next June and has drawn comparisons to Mario Lemieux?

The NHL has been siphoning talent from Europe for years and must do right by the countries and leagues that develop these stars, much as it does for the Canadian major junior leagues.