Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

There was some talk in the immediate aftermath of Ilya Kovalchuk's “retirement” announcement on Friday about what this would all mean for the ever-dwindling number of Russian players in the league.

Would other KHL teams throw massive amounts of money at them as well? Probably. Or at least they'd make noise about doing so. Would this prompt any of those players to leave the NHL? Well, that answer is less certain, for obvious reasons, but logic seems to dictate that the answer is "no."

The thing is that the KHL had all these Russian players already; so many went over to play there during the lockout, and were promised tons of money — like Kovalchuk was this week — to stay even after the lockout ended. This obviously would have put them in breach of their NHL contracts, something the Russian league has always seemed to care about very little anyway, and, like Kovalchuk, all but denied them the ability to ever return to North America to play professional hockey.

However noble Kovalchuk's reasons for jumping ship may have been–whether it boiled down to family or not wanting to be so far from his homeland any more or being paid $20 million a season–it must be said that, as Steve Whyno pointed out earlier this weekend, the circumstances are unique. New Jersey was obviously not happy to lose a player of that quality, but they had to be the ones to let him go, which they did because of the financial burden his contract created.

This was a team, struggling financially, that signed the player to a ludicrous, elephantine contract that made it far more difficult for anyone to swoop in and buy the team. The likelihood that we ever again see a player of this quality being allowed to duck out of an NHL contract with even a few years left before it ends seems extraordinarily low.

For players of any real quality, the first choice is almost always going to be playing in the NHL. Think about the players that jumped to the KHL this year alone: Derek Meech, Alexander Burmistrov, Ilya Kovalchuk.

What do you think the disparity in skill level is there? The KHL, for all the talk that it's trying to challenge the NHL in some kind of real way, remains a bit of a joke in terms of who actually plays there; it's the equivalent of baseball's AAA-quality players. Not quite good enough to hack it in the bigs, a little too good to be bussing it in the AHL.

The pay's good, too, but not as good as you'd think based on what Kovalchuk is going to get. Only 10 of the league's 26 teams spent more than $1 million on bringing over NHLers during the lockout. Not surprisingly, Kovalchuk's CSKA was way out in front with more than $10.1 million in that half-season. That club has deep pockets, as do a few others, but for the most part, these are small-time teams, and the league's newly instituted hard salary cap reflects it.

How much can you spend to put together a team there? Just $36 million, with the option to get one cap-exempt player under contract through an appeal to the league itself. Kovalchuk is just such a player, given that he meets the league's criteria as having played his previous season in the NHL and being eligible for the Russian national team.

The simple fact is that most KHL teams lose money. Estimates show only about four or five come up even every year. This is a league that just doesn't have the resources to throw anything resembling Kovalchuk money at the Evgeni Malkins and Alex Ovechkins of the world.

(Though one wonders just how willing the Capitals would be to have a Kovalchuk-like opt-out move come along for their captain in a few years if his play plummets and his paychecks stay the same).

Just look who's over there. The old joke about the complete lack of actual competition in the KHL has always been that NHL washout Kevin Dallman, he of 154 career games on three teams in as many seasons, has been the best defenseman in the league for years, with an almost Nick Lidstrom-like hold on the league's equivalent of the Norris. Look it up now and hey, there's Dallman, second in the league among KHL defensemen last season and first in goals, trailed by a bunch of 30-year-old Russians you've never heard of. Interestingly, Malkin finished third in points with 65, despite playing just 37 games to everyone else's 50ish.