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You can keep an eye on Air Katz here. They landed in Kelowna at 9:24 PM EDT and are presumably inside the Heatley Compound now. 1:45 on the clock.

H/T: Anonymous in an Lowetide thread.

Update: Departure scheduled for 12:01 EDT.

There seems to be some sort of a misunderstanding in the comments below about Nikolai Khabibulin’s established level of performance. Here are the save percentages of all goalies who have faced at least 5000 shots since 2005-06.

And he’s old. And he’s injury prone. And there were other options available. This is just an horrendously bad decision on the part of the Oilers.

For obvious reasons, I want good things to happen to Nikolai Khabibulin. With that said, the contrast between Alberta’s two hockey franchises has rarely been sharper than it is today. While Calgary is having a press conference to announce that they’ve added yet another elite player in the prime of his career, the Oilers are in the process of signing a 36 year old goalie to a four year contract. Why do I hate this contract so much?

1. Outside of 42 games in 2008-09, Khabibulin has not been a great goalie since 2001-02. Since then, he’s finished 18th, 27th, 43rd, 30th, 25th and 6th in save percentage. I am amazed at the number of people who are focused exclusively on the “6th” in 2008-09 with no thought whatsoever about the last five seasons and six years of his career. I was listening to Ryan Rishaug on Gregor’s show going on about how Khabibulin’s GAA is always below 3.00 which is a fine example of how setting the bar low enough will ensure that everyone passes.

2. Goalies don’t do keep playing very far beyond the age of 36, which was Khabibulin’s age by hockey-reference.com’s calculation. 28 goalies in NHL history have played at least 35 games at the age of 36. 18 goalies in NHL history have played at least 35 games at the age of 37. 10 goalies in NHL history have played at least 35 games at the age of 38. 8 goalies in NHL history have played at least 35 games at the age of 39. 4 goalies in NHL history have played at least 35 games at the age of 40. There is a tremendous rate of attrition just in terms of games played and that’s before you even get anywhere close to asking questions about the level of play which, for Khabibulin, has been exceedingly high once in the past six years.

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For reasons that I don’t understand, one of the crosses borne by those who cheer for the Oilers is that deals tend to be announced days to hours before they occur. Sometimes, this backfires in that no deal is made and a bunch of people look foolish. It appears to have happened again with Dany Heatley. People who look foolish? The Oilers, the Senators and Bob McKenzie.

Why do the Oilers and Senators look foolish? Well, from MacKenzie’s story:

A lot of confusion has existed because there is a $4 million bonus payment due to Heatley on July 1. It was the understanding of many involved, including the Senators and Oilers, that once the clock struck midnight and turned over to July 1, the Sens would be on the hook for the $4 million bonus payment, which may have been a serious impediment to getting a deal done after midnight.

But as it turns out, the NHL says as long as a Heatley trade is concluded before midnight eastern tomorrow night, the bonus payment allocation can be transferred to the new team.

So, in effect, the Senators have another 24 hours to find a suitable deal that Heatley will approve and NOT be on the hook for his $4 million signing bonus.

I was wondering this exact thing - I’ve looked through the CBA and couldn’t see a time for payment (as opposed to a date) specified anywhere. Moreover, it just seems bizarre to me that such a term would exist.

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When the NHL and NHLPA were engaged in their death struggle during 2004-05, I read a lot about salary caps and their likely impact. My view was that the NHL was probably going to end up with an economic structure like the NBA. I’m probably not even enough of an NBA fan to qualify as a casual fan but my understanding is that the NBA’s middle class has largely disappeared and teams have a few guys making incredible amounts of money, a small middle class and a large number of guys earning around the league minimum. Looking at the numbers in hockey though, that’s not what’s happened in the past four years.

Whenever you’re looking at this stuff, you need to have a little context. I’m comparing player cap hits in 2005-06 with the cap hits in 2008-09. I’m using the adjusted cap hits, so it allows for players spending part of a season in the NHL. For the 2005-06 data, I used NHLSCAP.com; for last season, I used nhlnumbers.com.

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I thought that this was kind of cool and hadn’t seen it before. The league was still going strong when I stopped wintering in Dawson Creek about 12 years ago, with guys like Marcel Capelle, Gene Cooper and and Dan Brennan playing for the Canucks. The big rivalry as of the late 1990’s was with Hythe, who had a team made up entirely of guys named Toews and Wallan and were, unfortunately, better than the Canucks. Fun hockey to watch though - I’ve never seen a trainer scale the glass to go into the stands since then.

Those of you who don’t read OilersNation will have missed a bizarre dispute over Gilbert Brule’s waiver status for 2009-10. It all started as a result of Jason Gregor’s answer to a question from a reader about the waiver status of Oilers players next season. Gregor (a professional reporter) responded:

Gilbert Brule doesn’t have to clear waivers at the start of the year, but once he plays three NHL games then he would have to.

Rob Schremp, Devon Dubnyk and Liam Reddox don’t have to clear waivers. They have only played three pro years, and have yet to play 160 NHL games, plus they are under 25. I have no idea why anyone would think Reddox needs to clear waivers. If a player has played four years pro, then he has to clear waivers regardless of how many NHL games he has played, or if he is over 25 years of age when the season starts.

Chorney and Peckham don’t have to clear.

Bubble guys that need to clear are Pouliot, MacIntyre, Jacques, Potulny (although I don’t think he has a chance of making team) and Stone.

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The reasons for Judge Baum’s rejection of Jim Balsillie’s offer to buy the Phoenix Coyotes is available online. Looking at some of the early stories, it seems to me that the story in Canada is probably going to be that the Coyotes will not be playing in Hamilton next year. That looks to be true. There are a lot of interesting pieces in the decision though. Like this, on the NHL’s right to approve Balsillie as an owner:

“Significant to the court here regarding the objection to the transfer of the ownership to the Phoenix Coyotes is the fact that in 2006 the NHL approved PSE to become a member of the NHL. The court has the firm sense that if the only issue here was PSE purchasing the Phoenix Coyotes [no relocation term] there would be no objection from the NHL. The law implies in every contract a convenant of good faith and fair dealing. Even where one party retains, by virtue of the contract, a right of approval or disapproval or a discretionary power over the right of the other, such parameters must be exercised within the parameters of good faith.”

PSE is Balsillie’s corporate alter-ego here. Reading between the lines, that reads to me like a pretty strong statement that the judge wouldn’t be convinced by any arguments that the NHL doesn’t like Balsillie as an owner, if a dispute ended up in front of him about it.

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Paul Kelly, per Puck Daddy:

Q. Viktor Kozlov(notes) signed in Russia earlier this week. There is also talk in Russia that Avangard Omsk is trying to get Michael Nylander over to the KHL. This brings the following question: in the absence of the transfer agreement between the NHL and the Russians, how can a player, like Nylander, with an NHL contract go and play it Russia?

KELLY: Technically, he can’t. Unless the Capitals take certain steps to end his contract by buying him out or something like that. And this is one of the issues we have had with the KHL. We should be respecting each other’s contracts. The NHL shouldn’t be signing any players under contract in Russia, and vice versa, they shouldn’t be signing guys who have NHL obligations. We will watch that very carefully, but they should not permit players, who have contractual obligations elsewhere, to sign.

Never in my life did I think I’d see a union leader who opposed greater opportunity and choice for the members of his union. I pointed this out to someone else, who wonders if this extends to players making trade demands - does Paul Kelly think that they should shut up and honour their contracts? I don’t know if this is just a poorly considered response or what, but if I played in the NHL, I would expect that my union’s position on this was, at worst, “No comment.”

Bizarre.