By Gare Joyce

SPORTSNET.CA

If you look at the CHL’s pre-season rankings, you’d presume that Windsor general manager Warren Rychel would be smiling. After all, his Spitfires are the top-ranked team in the land, the morning-line favourite for the Memorial Cup.

Smiling he wasn’t.

“If this doesn’t work out, if we don’t get this kid, they better keep the sharp objects away from me,” Rychel said, before donning the blades and getting in a skate.

The kid is Andrei Loktionov, a centre who played for Yaroslavl in the Russian league last winter and a member of the Russian team that won the silver medal at the world under-18s last spring. Los Angeles drafted Loktionov in the fifth round, 123rd overall last June. That’s where the Spitfires come in and Rychel’s woes begin.

“We knew that this was a season when we could make a big push to win a title and this kid is the type of player who could help us get there,” Rychel said. “So before the CHL import draft we did our homework. We talked to Los Angeles. We talked to his agent (Ian Pulver). It seemed everything was okay -- the kid was resigned from his contract. So we traded one of our top ‘91s (Garret Wilson) to Owen Sound to move up in the draft and take Loktionov. We had an understanding.”

So far this reads like a good-news story. In fact, it did read like one. Stay tuned for the plot twist.

The Spitfires looked like they were in the clover when the Kings signed Loktionov to a three-year contract last month and Jaroslavl didn’t kick up a fuss. Los Angeles general manager Dean Lombardi was keen to get Loktionov over to North America and the situation in Windsor, him playing a central role on a contender, was ideal. You can bank on this being discussed in the contract negotiations and safely bet on there being a clause in the deal regarding playing in the CHL. The contract was rubber-stamped in the NHL’s head office.

When it came time for the Spitfires to step in, Jaroslavl balked. The Russian team denied his release.

When I spoke to Rychel Wednesday he had just got off the phone with a lawyer who was filing a grievance with the International Ice Hockey Federation. Was he optimistic that he’d have Loktionov in the fold, if not in time for Windsor’s season-opener, then before the month is out?

Rychel was noncommittal.

“This is all new to me,” he said. “I’m going through this for the first time. I’m learning.”

The IIHF’s grievance process is supposed to take no more than two weeks. This will come as news to the London Knights, No. 3 on the pre-season rankings behind Windsor and defending Memorial Cup champion Spokane. The Knights have been trying, in vain so far, to bring in Sergei Korostin, another Russian forward, and a Dallas draftee in 2007. Moscow Dynamo, his Russian league team, didn’t try to block the Stars from signing Korostin to a three-year deal. In fact, last winter they seemed to have no problem with him joining -- brace yourself -- the Texas Tornado of the North American Hockey League. Evidently, it’s one thing to play in the Frisco Dr. Pepper StarCenter and another to play in the best development loop in the game.

So the Knights filed papers with the IIHF, which claims to turn around with these rulings in two weeks. That was four weeks ago. So far, nothing.

Where’s the CHL on this? Commissioner David Branch didn’t return a phone call but I’ll take one any time. I can tell you where the CHL should be: Beside Windsor, London and several other CHL clubs who are jammed up in the same situations. (Compounding the hurt: For the Czech Republic and Slovakia, this draft class was an annus horribilis and the nations have had very indifferent results internationally.)

It’s inadequate to describe relations between the North American hockey establishment and the KHL of Russia as frosty. A better word: radioactive. Going back to last summer there were rumblings that one of the oil billionaires in the KHL was going to take a run at Evgeni Malkin or some other young star, offering him four or even five times the NHL’s maximum salary. Didn’t happen.

No, instead the KHL made some minor moves -- Ray Emery had to go somewhere -- and one that rocked the NHL: the pillage of Alexander Radulov who was under contract to the Nashville Predators. The rogue league hasn’t struck again in this headline-grabbing fashion (and rumours are that Emery and Radulov are already unhappy, predictable after tasting the NHL life).

Under the big-media radar, though, the KHL is wreaking havoc with Canadian junior hockey. It shouldn’t be up to the individual teams, to Rychel in Windsor and the Hunter brothers in London, to take on the KHL with the IIHF refereeing like this guy. The CHL should have their backs and so should Hockey Canada and the NHL (it’s hard to imagine that L.A. and Dallas might be happy with how Loktionov and Korostin are playing in rookie camps but they can’t be too pleased with their development being compromised this year). They should play hardball. I’m not optimistic about Windsor, London and the others getting support. I hope Warren Rychel uses an electric shaver.

After reading something like this saga -- or writing it -- you’re tempted to call for the scrapping of the CHL’s import draft. If you want to play to the Coach’s Corner crowd, start ripping major junior hockey for granting eligibility to any foreign teenagers at all. Demand that teams put their imports on the first plane back to Moscow -- it’s like wrapping yourself in the flag.

It’s dumb. It’s cynical. And, worse, the quality of the CHL would suffer.

That last one is a point lost on critics of major junior’s very limited outreach to offshore prospects. Those who work in the game, the coaches, and the NHL scouts, know that a couple of imports on every team make the Canadian and American kids around them better players.

The vast majority of imports find their places on teams’ first two lines and a good number of them would rank among their clubs top three players. Just go around the OHL and the QMJHL the past few seasons and you’ll see that imports were hardly passengers on the best teams. Radulov was the main attraction when Quebec won the Memorial Cup, arguably the most impressive individual performance in recent tournament history. Sergei Kostitsyn racked up 131 points in 59 games for a London team that featured Patrick Kane and Sam Gagner. Mikkel Boedker fit right into the OHL champion Kitchener Rangers last season.

If you simply deleted their names from line-ups tomorrow, the falloff in talent with the names added as their replacements would be dramatic. Though you can’t get a major junior coach to admit it on the record -- it would be like spitting on the flag to do so -- every one of them knows that those replacements would be players who move directly to fourth lines and become spare parts. You’d be doing these kids a favour if you held them back to play Junior A or Junior B. They would get a lot more ice time and maybe some late developers would have a shot at landing scholarships to a NCAA school.

And though you can’t get general managers and owners to admit it, there’s hardly a surplus of domestic major-junior talent. What they’ll tell you when the notepad is put away: The CHL could lose a dozen teams and still struggle to fill it with quality players. It’s an unfortunate by-product of expansion.

Thus, the CHL’s import draft is an important part of the game, but it is broken and needs fixing. It should be an executive priority.

The way it lays, with teams granted two import picks every summer, it’s a seller’s market. The imports and their agents have CHL teams over a barrel. In fact, they have greater leverage in their negotiations than any Canadian or American kids. The clubs that drafted them have to do business with them or else risk coming up empty. The imports know it. Major junior execs dread it.

Fans like to watch the action -- such that it is -- at the teams’ tables on the floor of the NHL draft. Believe me, it’s nothing compared to the scene in the hallways of the arena where CHL owners and general managers are locked in a desperate dance with agents who represent the top imports and the player-personnel directors of the NHL teams that just drafted them.

“It’s the agents’ draft,” one major-junior coach told me the other day. The words can’t do his resignation justice.

Only one thing can fix this: competition.

The only way to give the lesser lights more leverage is to expand the import draft to three, four or five rounds, while keeping the two-import limit on team rosters.

Lots of teams every season get chumped by imports. The story usually plays out a couple of ways. A kid verbally signs off on a deal but later reneges, choosing to stay home to play for a team in his home country. Or an agent shakes a major-junior GM’s hand at the draft and then develops amnesia. On the rare occasion a teenage Euro drafted makes an NHL team roster out of training camp a couple of years before his expected arrival (possibly the case with Boedker in Phoenix this year). One way or the other, the team is then effectively out of options.

The dynamic is turned inside out if major-junior teams have fallbacks, rights to other import players. If a team could table an offer to an import draftee and tell him that he’s just one option the general manager is considering, the sellers’ market turns into a buyers’ market.

And even if it became a buyers’ market it would not necessarily become an unfair one to the players. It might look unfair to a third-round import draftee if his club successfully negotiated deals with its top two picks. A simple fix: After getting its two imports to camp, clubs would be required to release their other drafted Euros to a supplemental draft for teams that haven’t filled both slots.

An expanded import draft sounds like a radical move but it’s a necessary one. It won’t happen in time for Rychel or the Hunters if they can’t get the IIHF onside with them, but at least it will offer a fallback if a draftee is held hostage by his team back home -- or if a kid decides to hold a team in a jam hostage himself.

Gare Joyce will be writing on junior hockey for Sportsnet.ca this season. A veteran journalist, Joyce is the author of Future Greats and Heartbreaks: A Year Undercover in the Secret World of NHL Scouts, When the Lights Went Out: How One Brawl Ended Hockey's Cold War and Changed the Game and Sidney Crosby: Taking the Game by Storm. He also writes for ESPN The Magazine, espn.com and several Canadian magazines.