Nov. 29: The Flames announced Friday that Nikolaev has been released from his contract, confirming that he cleared unconditional waivers. They now have five open contract slots.
Nov. 28: It appears that the Flames will be parting ways with one of their prospects. James Mirtle of The Athletic reports (Twitter link) that the team has placed forward Ilya Nikolaev on unconditional waivers, a move that is generally made to pave the way to terminate a player’s contract.
The 23-year-old was a third-round pick by Calgary back in 2019, going 88th overall. Nikolaev spent the next two seasons in Russia before coming to North America for the 2021-22 campaign where he joined USHL Tri-City. A strong showing there that saw him record 23 goals and 49 assists in 58 regular season games helped earn him an entry-level deal soon after.
However, things haven’t gone well for Nikolaev since then. He spent his first two professional seasons split between AHL Calgary and ECHL Rapid City. In 2022-23, he played the bulk of his outings with the latter while last season, it was the other way around. The hope was that he’d at least be able to move up to the AHL level full-time this year but that didn’t happen. Nikolaev got into a pair of games with the Rush plus nine more with the Wranglers where he had four assists but clearly, he hadn’t cemented a full-time spot with them yet.
Nikolaev is in the final season of his entry-level contract and with how things had been going to this point, he was likely heading for a non-tender in June. Assuming that he clears waivers on Friday, he’ll become an unrestricted free agent and will likely look for another opportunity overseas. Once the deal is terminated, he’ll come off Calgary’s contract list which will bring them down to 45 out of the maximum of 50.
I wonder if there is something behind the story. We don’t see this very often, mid-season, with so much space on the team’s contract list. Hopefully it’s just a mutual agreement to give him a chance to play where he wants.
Foreign born players would much rather play back at home surrounded by friends and family than in the East Coast league…Probably not much more to the story than that.
Sounds about right. That and the bottom $$.. only makes $70,000 in the AHL and about $50,000 in the ECHL a year but would probably get about equal to about $100,000 USD playing in the KHL. A bit more money and being back home only makes sense to leave. That’s why North American players that have no chance to make the NHL and a low chances of even sticking in the AHL go over to Europe.. if I remember correctly most ECHL players average about $500 per week (some more and some less) but can make double in Europe and places
I could be wrong, but was under the impression that you can send players over-seas and keep their rights. It sounds like they are dropping him outright. With plenty of room for players in the organization, it just seems a little weird.