Manitoba Moose

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Capology has Hawks winger going up and down like yo-yo

By: Paul Wiecek

26/11/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

Chicago’s Bryan Bickell (left) celebrates his game-winner Sunday. (DARRYL DYCK / THE CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVES )

ROCKFORD, Ill. -- Four times this young season, the Chicago Blackhawks have called up left-winger Bryan Bickell. And four times they have sent him right back down here to their AHL affiliate, the IceHogs -- usually within just a day or two.

Sounds strange? It gets stranger. Bickell's most recent demotion came just this Monday, his apparent reward for scoring the only goal the night before in a 1-0 Hawks win over their new arch-rival, the Vancouver Canucks.

So what is it about this poor Bickell kid that causes the Blackhawks to banish him as soon as they embrace him, with no apparent regard for what he does on the ice?

New math

Put simply, Bickell is the human face of the new math that is the National Hockey League, a place where every team now has a "capologist" working right alongside the general manager -- some might say above the GM -- to make the numbers off the ice stay within the league's salary cap.

The salary-cap system has moved the game of hockey outside the boards and into the boardrooms, where teams now look to wring every possible advantage out of the fledgling system, no matter how small, just as surely as they will exploit an opposing goaltender's weakness low to the stick side.

The result has sometimes been farcical, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the case of Bickell, who has become an unwitting pawn in a bit of a scam the Hawks are playing on the system this season.

With the talent-laden Hawks team right up against the $56.8-million salary cap, they are using the advantage of close proximity to their AHL affilate, just 120 kilometres west on I-90, to game the system for a few extra cap bucks.

In the case of Bickell, that's meant having to endure the repeated shaming of getting called up by the Hawks to play a game or two and then getting sent right back down here so Chicago doesn't have to count his $500,000 NHL salary against their cap limit for the days the Hawks don't play a game.

"Basically, I've been playing up there but practising down here," Bickell said Wednesday night after his club's 2-1 loss to the Moose.

It's a lousy deal for Bickell, who not only has to endure the public humiliation and extra kilometres on his car's drive train, but also has to take a huge pay cut every time the Hawks do it -- from the $500,000 he makes up there to the $95,000 he makes down here.

Not that you'll catch him complaining about the six games he has played in the NHL this year: "I'm willing to do whatever they want me to do."

The Hawks' second-round pick in the 2004 draft, the 23-year-old native of Bowmanville, Ont., scored three goals in just 13 NHL games over the past three seasons and can clearly handle himself, judging by his first-period scrap with Moose defenceman Geoff Waugh Wednesday night.

But with Marian Hossa taking his spot on the Hawks roster in Hossa's return to the NHL Wednesday night, it could be awhile before Bickell gets called up again.

But the kid is patient, if nothing else.

"It's just the way it is right now," Bickell said, "and all I can do is keep playing and hoping that eventually I'll get my chance to go up there and stay there."

Is it legal? Well, no one's called the Hawks on it yet this season and other teams have done similar things, although the Hawks appear to have made it an art form, having done something similar with another Hogs forward, Jack Skille, this season.

And it's been born of necessity as the Hawks flirt dangerously with the cap limit right now, even as they sit on the verge of locking up long-term contracts their young triumvirate, referred to in the media here as the "Holy Trinity", of Patrick Kane and Winnipeggers Jonathon Toews and Duncan Keith.

Reports are that deals have been reached with all three Hawks players but they are being held up while the Hawks search for wiggle room in the cap.

It seems hard to believe that shaving a couple thousand off Bickell's contract will help them pay Keith something like $75 million over 13 years, the estimate on the contract he's reportedly agreed to.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 26, 2009 C1

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