Kariya Gets Big Payday From Ducks

Fourteen months after drafting the player they wanted to build their franchise around, the Mighty Ducks finally signed Paul Kariya to a three-year, $6.5-million contract Wednesday night.

The deal, which pays $4.775 million in signing bonuses and a $575,000 annual salary, ends a saga so drawn out and complicated that General Manager Jack Ferreira said weeks ago that when and if Kariya signed, the newspaper headline should simply be, “Finally.”

Kariya was relieved, too, after quickly agreeing to a few details so that he could avoid the uncertainties of a new standard NHL contract that went into effect Thursday--and perhaps the threat of a rookie salary cap that might emerge from ongoing collective bargaining talks.

“I feel ecstatic,” said Kariya, 19, the former University of Maine player who starred for Canada in the Winter Olympics and World Championships. “I’m really excited. At the same time, I’m relieved the negotiating process is over and I finally get to play hockey.”

In the end, the Ducks made Kariya a very rich rookie by NHL standards, giving the fourth overall selection in the 1993 NHL draft a contract that will pay him an average of $2.166 million a year.

That’s more than 1993’s second overall choice, Chris Pronger, got from the Hartford Whalers, who gave him a four-year, $7-million deal worth an average of $1.75 million a year. Kariya also wound up with more money than the Ducks gave their second overall pick this year, defenseman Oleg Tverdovsky, who signed a three-year, $4.2-million contract paying an average of $1.4 million a year on Aug. 15.

In fact, it’s more than the Ducks implied they’d ever pay an unproven rookie, calling the contracts of Pronger and Ottawa’s Alexandre Daigle last year “aberrations.”

Actually, if Daigle’s five-year, $12.25-million contract ($2.45 million a year) is converted from Canadian to U.S. dollars, Kariya will average more.

The signing caps a spending spree by the Ducks, who had the NHL’s lowest payroll last season at $7.8 million but have since spent nearly $13.5 million on draft choices.

“I think we proved we’re serious about improving our team,” Ferreira said. The Ducks won 33 games in their first season, sharing an NHL expansion record with Florida, but the team had the worst power play in the NHL and struggled offensively.

Ferreira said Kariya’s performance since the ’93 draft, when he was considered a skilled and imaginative playmaker who might be too small for the NHL, justified the contract.

“He has proved himself over and above anyone else in that draft,” Ferreira said. “Paul has really taken himself to a different level. He went to the Olympics and the World Championships, and at the World Championships he was playing among all those NHL players. He was (Canada’s) leading scorer and one of the outstanding players of the tournament.

“We feel we’ve gotten the two best players in the last two drafts. We got both of the players we rated No. 1. We rated Kariya No. 1 and we rated Tverdovsky No. 1.”

The Kariya negotiations didn’t start until after the 1994 Winter Games at Lillehammer, Norway, when the Ducks made an initial offer worth less than $1 million a year. They stalled this summer when agent Don Baizley said that if Kariya didn’t reach terms with the Ducks this year, he should become an unrestricted free agent next June since he would be too old to return to the draft under NHL rules as most unsigned players do.

The stalemate didn’t break until the Ducks met with Kariya and Baizley last week, raised their original offer by more than a $1 million and told them it would be their last and best.

Club President Tony Tavares said: “We respect Paul, but he’s a piece of a puzzle as opposed to the entire puzzle. I don’t want people getting their expectation level to where they expect a 19-year-old guy to score 50 goals and have 70 assists. He still has to make the adjustment.”

Coach Ron Wilson is delighted to add Kariya.

“We just didn’t have the ability to do a lot of things creative offensively last year,” Wilson said. “Now we’ve got people with the creativity and imagination to create things and we need to finish off the chances they create. I wasn’t disappointed in our shots on goal, just our ability to finish them off.”

He envisions Kariya playing wing with center Anatoli Semenov, another skillful playmaker.

“Who he’s paired off with on the wing would depend on the situation,” Wilson said. “It could be a skill guy like Valeri Karpov or a Garry Valk, or in the event things get a little physical, a Todd Ewen or a Stu Grimson.”