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Ivan Demidov : the SKA was going to offer him a five-year contract
Félix Forget
Ivan Demidov : the SKA was going to offer him a five-year contract
Credit: Getty Images
For the past 48 hours, it’s been Ivan Demidov madness in Montreal. The prospect, who wasn’t expected this season, has finally been released by SKA and is currently on his way to join the Habs in Toronto.

Let’s recall that he will set foot on Canadian soil in about two hours.

That being said, seeing SKA change its mind and release him is really something special. Roman Rotenberg, his coach in Russia, justified it all by saying he wanted to respect the kid’s wishes… and that a series with Ovechkin-Demidov would be big talk in Russia.

However, this morning, a high-ranking SKA official also admitted that the reality of the salary cap in the KHL worked against the team in its attempt to keep Demidov.

And what we’re learning now is that SKA had intended to offer Demidov a contract extension that would have made him the team’s highest-paid player…

And that contract would have been for a duration of five years.

By reading the article from MatchTV (a Russian media outlet that is the source of this information), we understand that the salary cap ultimately worked against SKA. In fact, what needs to be understood is that Demidov’s salary would not have counted towards the team’s payroll next season due to his age, but beyond 2025-26, it would have.

Let’s recall that in Russia, the details of player contracts are extremely difficult to find. We don’t know what Demidov’s salary would have been for such a contract (because we don’t know what the highest-paid player on SKA is currently earning)… but in any case, he risks making a lot more money on his second contract, which will start in 2027-28.

Imagine the reaction in Montreal if Demidov had accepted such an offer. The team would have been deprived of its best prospect for the next five years… and who knows if he would have ever made the jump.

Luckily, the kid dreams of the NHL… and luckily, the salary cap worked against SKA in all this. Because if the announcement of Demidov’s arrival has brought a ton of happiness to Habs fans over the past two days, the opposite would have been true if he had decided to extend his stay in Russia for five more years…


Overtime

– Hello, Lane.

– Will he be able to convince Sidney Crosby to go with him?

– News about the Habs’ most popular European prospect at the moment, hehe.

– Good news.

– Notable.

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