As a Red Wings fan, I can't help but grumble about Soderberg: Friedman duly notes that the NHL is about to renew its transfer agreement with the the Swedish Ice Hockey Federation, so there's some "strong-arming" going on, but the SIHF initially forbade both Soderberg and Wings prospect Calle Jarnkrok from playing in any NHL games and remaining in North America past April 14th because Sweden is co-hosting the World Championships in Stockholm, along with Helsinki, Finland.

Sweden's going to hold the medal rounds in the second and final year of the Stockholm-Helsinki partnership, and after over-pricing round robin games to the point that the Globen Arena was half-full many nights, the SIHF recruited Nicklas Lidstrom, Peter Forsberg and Mats Sundin to serve as ambassadors, they're reducing ticket prices and they've really clamped down on the personnel coach Par Marts wants to employ.

In Soderberg's case, the SIHF had refused to allow him to sign with Boston because it claimed that Swedish contracts don't expire until May 15th (per Expressen's Gunnar Nordstrom and Sebastian Mattson), and they insisted that Soderberg was required to report for the Worlds, but Soderberg's agent informed Expressen's Mattias Ek that they'd told the Swedish national team to get bent, and today, SIHF VP Peter Forsberg (not the ambassador Forsberg, another fellow) told Expressen's Gunnar Nordstrom that the NHLPA informed them that the previously-signed Soderberg couldn't play for Boston.

The problem here is that the same case is true for Jarnkrok, who the Red Wings signed a year ago and loaned to Brynas IF, but he's leaving the AHL's Grand Rapids Griffins tonight to report for the Worlds because that was the only way the SIHF agreed to allow Jarnkrok to play for the Wings' farm team.

For the record, the reason you never see Russian prospects join NHL teams down the stretch is due to a similar situation: the KHL states very plainly that its contracts go from May to May, so they look very poorly upon any players leaving for the NHL, AHL or anywhere else--regardless of their nationality--even though the only teams playing as of April 13th are Dynamo Moscow and Traktor Chelyabinsk, who are battling in the Gargarin Cup Final (Dynamo leads the series 3-1 after a 1-0 win today; and for Wings fans, you know that Alexei Marchenko's been allowed to practice with the Griffins but not play in any games, lest he suffer an injury while still technically employed by Sergei Fedorov and CSKA Moscow. The Wings want to sign him and bring him over to North America, and while CSKA Moscow was eliminated in the 2nd round of the KHL playoffs and Marchenko's iffy to play in the Worlds, rules are rules).

Long story short, for those of you who don't already know it, the World Championships generally take place immediately after European pro leagues' championships are awarded, and the Worlds are gigantic moneymakers for the venues that host them, the IIHF (there's a reason the IIHF gets so twitchy about the Worlds--it makes most of its money from controling the ads and TV/Internet rights to the Worlds) and the World Championship remains a title of enormous international prestige, so if your team has a European-drafted prospect who wasn't allowed to play for that team, even though that team's signed him, now you know why.