American-Belarusian left winger Shane Prince, 32, has signed a one-year contract with Torpedo Nizhny Novgorod, the KHL club announced on Sunday.
Torpedo becomes the former NHLer’s sixth KHL team over eight seasons.
A native of Rochester, N.Y., Prince played junior hockey for the OHL’s Kitchener Rangers and Ottawa 67’s and was chosen by the Ottawa Senators in the second round, 61st overall, in the 2011 NHL Entry Draft.
Between 2014 and 2018, Prince played 128 NHL regular-season games for the Senators and New York Islanders, scoring 12 goals and adding 26 assists for 38 points with 39 penalty minutes. He also played in 11 playoff games for the Islanders in 2016, scoring three goals and adding an assist.
Since 2018, Prince has played in Europe – mostly in the KHL, but he also had a couple of short tours of duty in Switzerland with HC Davos and HC Lugano.
Torpedo is Prince’s fifth KHL team following Sibir Novosibirsk, Dinamo Minsk, Avtomobilist Yekaterinberg, Spartak Moscow and Admiral Vladivostok. Prince has 203 points in 334 career KHL regular-season and playoff games.
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During Prince’s two seasons in Minsk, he was naturalized as a Belarusian citizen for the purpose of strengthening the country’s national team. Prince played for Belarus at the 2021 World Championship in Riga and in an Olympic qualifying tournament in Bratislava in August of that year before Belarus was banned from IIHF competition in 2022.
Other naturalized Belarusians who played alongside Prince included American-born defenseman Nick Bailen, Canadian-born forwards Geoff Platt and Francis Paré and Canadian-born goaltender Danny Taylor.
As a citizen of one of the four countries where the league is based, Prince does not count against a KHL team’s quota of import players.
Torpedo currently sits first in the Bobrov Division and second in the Western Conference with 19 points in 16 games.
Ex-NHLer Retires From Chinese KHL Team
Chinese-Canadian
right winger Brandon Yip, 40, announced his retirement on Wednesday
through a social media post of the Shanghai Dragons, the KHL club he
has been associated with for the past eight years.