American-Belarusian left winger Shane Prince, 32, was traded within the KHL from Spartak Moscow to Admiral Vladivostok in exchange for monetary compensation, the latter club announced on Wednesday.
A native of Rochester, NY, 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.
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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.
Admiral is Prince’s fifth KHL team following Sibir Novosibirsk, Dinamo Minsk, Avtomobilist Yekaterinberg and Spartak, where he’d played since 2022 leading up to this week’s trade.
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 and Canadian-born forwards Geoff Platt and Francis Paré and Canadian-born goaltender Danny Taylor.
Prince had seven points in 13 games for Spartak this season. In his career, Prince has 193 points in 301 KHL regular-season and playoff games over seven seasons.
Spartak sits second out of 11 teams in the KHL’s Western Conference, while Admiral is sixth out of 12 teams in the Eastern Conference.
As a citizen of Belarus, one of four countries that are home to KHL clubs, Prince is considered a domestic player according to the league’s rules and therefore does not count against a team’s quota of import players.