Opinion

By Eric McErlain

updated 4:43 p.m. ET July 22, 2008

It was just last week that I warned that Russia's nascent Kontinental Hockey League represented a legitimate threat to the way that the NHL did business.

Now, here we are just a week later, and the brewing competition between the two leagues over hockey talent -- in particular Russian-born hockey talent -- is threatening to escalate into a full-scale war.

First, we ought to recap what's happened since last week's column.

On July 15, the NHL and the KHL announced that the two leagues had come to an interim agreement to respect one another's contracts -- an arrangement that would seem to indicate that the deal winger Alexander Radulov signed with Salavat Yulaev Ufa while still under contract with the Nashville Predators would be null and void. But that's not the understanding of KHL President Alexander Medvedev, who told everyone willing to listen that Radulov's deal with the last champions of the Russian Super League would stand because it was signed well before the NHL and KHL completed the latest agreement.

A couple of days later, the International Ice Hockey Federation announced that six players, including Radulov, would be suspended from international play pending an investigation into their status -- an announcement that was responded to in kind by the KHL, which reiterated its intention to allow Radulov to play this season. The KHL statement was quickly followed by another issued by NHLPA Executive Director Paul Kelly, who protested the IIHF's action, writing that it had "no basis in law or fact" in the absence of an official player transfer agreement between the NHL and KHL.

Meanwhile, Radulov is acting a lot like a player who knows he'll be spending next season in Russia. He has already started training camp with Salavat Ulaef in Finland.

So what happens next, and what options does the NHL have? For some answers, I picked up the phone and called an old blogging friend, sports law expert Michael McCann. McCann is currently scheduled to teach next semester at Boston College Law School before taking up a full-time position at Vermont Law School. Better yet, he's the founder of Sports Law Blog and is currently the in-house legal expert at SI.com.

According to McCann, the Predators could sue Salavat and the KHL for contractual interference in the U.S. courts, where the team would have a "very strong claim that their rights were infringed in an intentional way," a notion that would have to be reinforced by the fact that the KHL has already announced that players signed away from the NHL who were already under contract wouldn't count against the league's salary cap.

But the problems would start for the Predators and the NHL when they went looking for a Russian authority to enforce their claim. As I've noted before, the Russian political system is more or less 100 percent behind the activities of the KHL, and any Russian judge who decided to prevail against the KHL would find it to be a "really unpopular move," McCann told me.

"U.S. courts can say whatever they want, but it takes two to tango ... If the Russian courts or other authorities aren't enforicng our civil judgments, they become meaningless," McCann said. "There's no point in sanctioning leagues in Russia. It's going to be difficult to get the player back through legal channels. The only way to do it would be for the NHL to come to an agreement with the KHL -- and that's not on the horizon."

But where our conversation got a little more interesting is when we began to look down the road a few more years -- something that I believe too many North American observers of this story have neglected to do. For the most part, those who have tried to discount the impact of the KHL on the NHL's operations have looked only at the near-term implications. But as I noted last week, teams like Salavat, Ska St. Petersburg and Lokomotiv aren't the weak sisters many WHA franchises were. Instead, they're established brands with growing international followings.

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