Slitty said:
Russian Sport Express interview with Dinamo's General Director or somesuch reveals that Dinamo is not interested in money and will not accept compensation.
Their one and only goal is to bring Ovechkin back. "1 million would not contribute in the slightest significance to the budget of any RSL club" the guy said.
Well, when you're worth ten trillion dollars and could simply buy the NHL as a whole and make it your farm league, what's another mil?
My biggest problem is, if you can't secure a kid's rights to play anywhere, at the time he's fourteen, just what can you do these days?
And, as usual, I stand to be corrected, but I understood a poster a couple of months ago to say that a kid signed a contract as a minor in order to ensure he had a future in hockey, and said contract beheld him to the club/league/state until he was twentysomething.
The poster said this was legit, because parents of Russian buds didn't have the money to play hockey, so they were essentially "adopted" by the state, or the oligarchs, who had them sign contracts saying that, in return for their "junior" years development, they were committing their rights to RSL-type clubs, who held their rights.
This seems different to me than someone, say, being drafted by an NHL team and deciding to play in Sweden. It would appear, to my simple eyes, that players in Russia are becoming indentured to teams before they are of the age to legally accept said indenture, and that this does not only hold true on restrictions for simply signing with another team, but for signing with any other league in the world.
You get drafted by the NHL, and you either sign with the team that picked you or you play somewhere else.
You are a hotshot 14-year old in Russia and you either sign with that team or you're toast, period. In return, you get training, etc, but you can't sign with another team anywhere, not just that Russian league.
What exactly are the laws over there surrounding minors signing legally-binding contracts?