Pierre Gauthier is quite the sneaky fellow, no?

Two weeks ago I asked him in a room full of reporters what the status was of Russian defenceman Alexei Yemelin, and whether the Canadiens were any closer to signing him with the expiration of his contract with Ak Bars Kazan of the Kontinental Hockey League coming up.

Gauthier responded that nothing had changed, and that once there was a new development we would know about it. But on top of that, he appeared to look frustrated with Russian players in general, questioning whether or not KHL contracts meant anything to begin with.

Then Tuesday, speaking at the announcement for the Quebec Hockey Summit, Gauthier essentially said the same thing when asked about Yemelin by reporters.

Lo and behold, Marc de Foy reports in Wednesday morning's Journal de Montreal – a story written the same day as that press conference – that Yemelin is on the verge of signing with the Canadiens, something TSN's Bob McKenzie seconded Wednesday morning on the Team 990.

Marc-Antoine Godin of La Presse then reported via Twitter that Yemelin's agent Don Meehan and Gauthier would be meeting no sooner than next Tuesday to negotiate, which is essentially a formality because Yemelin is still subject to the NHL's entry-level contract rules, but because he's 25 he can sign for just one year. I've tried to figure out how much his contract would be worth, and as far as I can tell he'd be eligible for a base salary of $925,000 plus up to $92,500 in bonuses which would make for a total of $1,017,500. I might be wrong on this, and if I am, please let me know.

(UPDATE 3:51 p.m.: As I suspected, I botched this good and proper. Yemelin's base salary as a 2004 draft pick would in fact be capped at $984,200, and he would be eligible to receive up to $2,850,000 in performance bonuses for a total amount of $3,834,200.

That's a massive difference from what I had actually surmised. What's tricky here is that under normal circumstances, the Canadiens could simply offer up the max amount of performance bonuses confident in the fact that Yemelin would be unlikely to reach the great majority of them. Except this season, with the current CBA due to expire, there is no bonus cushion. That complicates matters immensely.

A bonus cushion is a mechanism that allows teams to exceed the salary cap to pay out those performance bonuses, with a penalty the following year equal to the amount the cap is exceeded by. It was a mechanism used by the Blackhawks to sign Marian Hossa for that Stanley Cup run, but which ultimately led to the dismantling of that team because the Blackhawks worked under a vastly lower salary cap figure this season due to the bonus cushion penalty.

So, to make a long story short, Yemelin's contract is not as much of an open and shut case as first believed, because these bonuses will in fact need to be negotiated.

Hat tip to Twitter follower and CBA aficionado @Wayne_Chow for setting me straight.)

Yemelin creates a domino effect

The imminent Yemelin signing puts the rest of the Canadiens defence into clear perspective.

If there was any doubt Andrei Markov would be re-signed I think they can now safely be put to rest. Both Markov and Yemelin are represented by Meehan, and the Canadiens will most definitely want Markov around to ease Yemelin into his new environment. There are very few Russian defencemen playing today that command the respect Markov does, and his influence and status on the team will help Yemelin through any rough patches he may experience, because there could be several.

That factor adds another ace in Meehan's hand when negotiating Markov's contract, because the team can no longer pretend it can survive without him. Having Yemelin aboard makes signing Markov an absolute necessity for the Canadiens, and that helps Meehan tremendously.

The arrival of Yemelin also means that Roman Hamrlik is all but assured of hitting the unrestricted free agent market, as Eric Engels spells out here. With Markov, P.K. Subban, Jaroslav Spacek and, in all likelihood, Josh Gorges, Yannick Weber and Hal Gill returning, Yemelin gives the Canadiens seven defencemen with which to begin the season.

Suddenly, a defence corps that was seen as old and slow will have four members of its top six that are 27 or younger and that are all mobile, assuming Spacek becomes the seventh defenceman.

One mean cookie

So, what do we know about Yemelin?

From all accounts, he's a defencemen that plays with a mean streak that belies his modest 6-foot, 187-pound frame who also has some offensive upside (UPDATE (3:51 p.m.: Yemelin has apparently grown a fair bit since the outdated stats used by the Canadiens website were recorded. According to the IIHF website he is in fact 6-foot-2, 223 pounds, which is big. Hat tip to Twitter follower @WSpy for being the first to point it out.)

At just 25 years of age he's already played seven pro seasons in the top level of Russian hockey, and over the last six of them he's played at least 43 games in each one (the Russian league season this year was 54 games).

Yemelin just completed his fourth season with Ak Bars Kazan of the KHL and in 52 regular season games, he had 11 goals and 16 assists for 27 points, second on the team in scoring among defencemen. He was a plus-17, tied for second on the team with seven power play goals and played an average of 19:16 per game, fifth among the team's defencemen.

Those numbers placed him pretty high in the KHL among defencemen, ranked 11th in points, tied for sixth in goals, tied for eighth in plus-minus and tied for third in power play goals.

On top of that, Yemelin appears to have a propensity for some rough stuff. He was absolutely destroyed in a fight with former NHLer Alexander Svitov two years ago, but he's handed out a number of questionable boarding and cross-checking incidents in the past.

The most recent one came at the current World Championships in Slovakia, where Yemelin is playing for Russia and where Gauthier has gone to observe his new defenceman. Yemelin was given a boarding major and game misconduct for this hit on Ziga Jeglic in the preliminary round, leaving the Slovenian a bloody mess.