Bad Blood Forces Burke's Hand?

1) As soon as we were told this past Friday morning of the Ducks intention to waive their back up goalie Ilya Bryzgalov we started our quest to find the REAL reason for such an apparently mystifying course of action. Why were we mystified:

• By placing Ilya on 'waivers' the Ducks will lose him and get no compensation other than modest salary cap relief(Bryzgalov makes a mere 1.36 mil and already 20% of this has been paid)
• If they retained him he most likely would have been one of the more sought after goalies available at the trade deadline. As Fauxrumors alluded to in their post shopping-for-goalies. that there are few decent goalies that a team could pick up right now. They lose an important potential trade chip, for no apparent reason.
• If they were trying to unload him during the summer/at the draft would have been the more logical time period for this.

2) So why now? Why not wait another month or two when inevitably a team might need a goalie due to injury, poor play, etc? When Bryzgalov's modest salary would be a far less bite into a team payroll. This what we have been hearing:

• Since the Ducks won the Cup, starter J-S Giguere has had an ego that has annoyed even his best buddies on the team. As one Duck writer told us yesterday, "Giguere's been a dick since they won". There have been rumblings that team mates were miffed at his cockiness, but no one was more affected by the change in personality than the team's back up, Ilya Bryzgalov.
• Apparently the two were never buddies, but had a professional appreciation for each other's abilities. Ilya felt he earned more playing time than he garnered last season, and felt that the team, and Giguere especially forget that it was Bryzgalov who started the playoffs last spring.
• Winning seemed to at least temporarily put the turmoil under cover. For the off season anyway. Burke had much bigger issues to deal with, and the last thing he needed was to deal with personality conflicts among his goalies. To hedge his bets he signed 25 year old Swiss goalie sensation Jonas Hiller. Feeling that he could use him to eventually replace Bryzgalov next season.
• From the first day of camp Bryzgalov felt like he was an unwanted man. Giguere with his Cup win, and long term contract was insufferably a jerk to Ilya. Treating him like an untested rookie at his first camp. Meanwhile Bryzgalov felt he deserved to play a larger role with the team OR be traded before the season.
• It got worse from there. There was even an altercation that occurred while the team was in London for the silly 2 games with the Kings. Evidently Giguere said something that Ilya felt was the last straw, and he threatened to walk off the team and head back to play in Russia. Burke and coach Randy Carlyle persuaded Bryzgalov to stay with the team, but Burke told Ilya he'd start to look into a trade
• As the weeks went by Burke could not seem to get a deal consummated. Sure he had offers, but nothing that made sense to his team at the time, so he told Ilya he was going to wait on a deal until after the beginning of the New year.
• At first Bryzgalov was OK with that, but as one insider told us, 'you couldn't even cut the tension between Ilya and J-S with a knife, it was that thick!'. It all came to a head we're told last weekend. After a practice Ilya stormed off and called his agent, who in turn informed the Ducks they had 10 days to either trade his client or waive him else Bryzgalov was going to back to Russia to play on his old team, Tolyatti Lada who were eager to get back his services.
• Burke had little choice but to quickly field what offers he could, but the word was out, and no GM was going to help out the fiery Burke at his time of need, so Burke did what he had to, placed Bryzgalov on waivers and promote Hiller from the AHL to back up Giguere.

3) As more information becomes available we will of course send it along here. As always, keep it here for all the latest!