Nikita Kucherov Wants Out, And He’s Not Alone

There is a sign outside the NHL league offices in New York and Toronto (yep, there are two of them) stolen from construction sites that reads: “(Number) Of Days Since The Last Trade Demand.” The current number is 3, and the latest is the strangest so far.

It came from Tampa’s notoriously taciturn star Nikita Kucherov, who had told his teammates on a team flight that he 1) would not re-sign with the Lightning next summer, 2) wants to be traded somewhere else, and 3) intends to keep playing for the time being while his wishes are accommodated by the team. That last part won him the defense of his coach, Jon Cooper, but it also won a public rejection from general manager Julien BriseBois. So yeah, stay tuned for more fun in our next exciting episode.

Kucherov is the fourth big-name NHL player to seek immediate relocation to the players’ new favorite team, SOTH (Somewhere Other Than Here). His pursuit of SOTH has been more amicable than his peers’ because he didn’t make a public show of his unhappiness (that’s what agents are for) and is not refusing to play. Indeed, he assisted on three of the four Tampa Bay goals in their 5-4 shootout loss to the highly ordinary Predators, so a case can be made that he is still giving his all for the olde towne team. A better case could probably have been made if we had bothered to watch the game, but transparency requires that we admit we were watching the WNBA because every Game 7 is by definition better than every other game in any other sport at any other time.

That accountability dispensed with, we return to the point, which is that Kucherov is the fourth big name (plus half-credit to Quinn Hughes) to demand relocation since the tail end of last season. The stop-and-go dance began when Ottawa’s Brady Tkachuk let his father and brother express his desire to be moved from Canada’s capital to Florida’s last frontier. The Senators made it happen with alacrity, if only to be rid of the burdens of having Tkachuks in triplicate. Either because or despite of that move, the Senators are off to their best start in nine years.

Since then, Connor Hellebuyck declined to devote no more energy to the Winnipeg Jets, refused to go to camp, was suspended and sacrificed $930,000 USD in salary, and finally was granted his repatriation—to scenic Newark, New Jersey. He has won both his starts (at Dallas and at Vegas), while the Jets have lost nine in succession, and everyone who cares about the temperature of the average Manitoban with the onset of winter will be watching next Tuesday when the Devils travel to the ‘Peg. The current betting is that Jake Allen will make the start, because Hellebuyck is not admired in the hockey-speaking world for paying his way off his team.

Worse still is Detroit’s Dylan Larkin, who issued a trade demand because he hated the Red Wings and their former general manager Steve Yzerman, left camp, then returned (after Yzerman’s departure) and played well for a while as a show of good (or just less bad) faith, then announced last week that he’d played enough because the Wings weren’t acting on his trade demand; he has been pilloried in the sinkhole of antisocial media ever since. The Wings have gone 5-2-3 with him, and 1-3-0 without him. Lots of people don’t like Larkin for reversing his decision to play, but lots more kind of see his point because they also don’t like the Wings’ preposterous failson owner Chris Ilitch, who is currently bungling the contract negotiations for young defenseman Simon Edvinsson.

And finally, there is Hughes’s quaint standoff in Minnesota. He essentially muscled his way off the sunken ship that is Vancouver last year and is currently playing well for a good Wild team but could demand to bolt at any minute for the siren song of … well, it depends. Denver? Las Vegas? His brothers’ team in New Jersey? Whatever the case, he’s already shown that he’s willing to make it happen while fiddling over a contract offer from the Wild.

Hockey players are by and large fairly docile when it comes to starting fights with management, and management likes to play on that acquiescence. The NFL, conversely, uses its staggeringly high injury rate to keep the shop floors in line, while the NBA is pretty much a player’s market on a daily basis. Baseball’s owners seem ready and even eager to scupper next season entirely to reset the balance of power in its market. The point here is that, with a new spike in the NHL’s revenues and salary cap numbers expected, players—well, four, anyway—are demanding their freedom with varying degrees of vehemence. The fact that four of them did so in the last six months represents a socialist revolution in the making, at least relative to the sport’s longstanding norms.

Except for the fact that only two got their way, and one of the two had to pay nearly a million scoots for it. In fact, this probably isn’t a movement at all, and more a confluence of circumstances. Tkachuk wanted to play in Florida with his brother Matthew. Larkin wanted to go to a team that knows how the playoff structure works. Kucherov, per reporting from The Athletic’s Chris Johnston, wants to be the first $20 million player in league history, and at age 33 wants that for the next six years, taking him into Sidney Crosby (if not Jaromir Jagr) territory. Logic suggests that the “33 going on 39” part is the hold up, here, because Kucherov has been one of the game’s best players since he was 21. In such a flush period for league revenue, he is as deserving of 20 large as anyone, so the issue must actually be the term.

The troublesome thing for both the teams and pro-management fan bases isn’t Tkachuk, who just passive-aggressively talked his way out through his brother and dad, or Kucherov, who hasn’t talked it to anyone but his co-workers. The issue is much more the approach of Hellebuyck and Larkin, who just walked. Larkin, for his part, is suspended without pay, but like Hellebuyck will be back on the payroll shortly due to the rules of the current CBA that prevent a suspension from being open-ended.

In the meantime, we can keep an eye on the last-place Wings to see if Larkin’s absence has a different effect than his presence, and on what happens next Tuesday in the ‘Peg, where the Jets’ collapse is being tied emotionally to the Hellebuyck saga. Four is not a movement, and barely even a trend. But it is a demonstration that dropping tools is now an available tactic for a certain class of hockey player. That’s a liberating notion for players who have had enough of having enough, and it is but one step away from the platinum standard of player empowerment—demanding a trade at the press conference announcing your new deal. As avant-garde entertainment, it sure beats whatever the Philadelphia Flyers are doing these days.