Fresh off a Stanley Cup victory, the Hurricanes face a looming decision: lock up their prized Russian blueliner or leverage his trade value for another blockbuster.
The Carolina Hurricanes don't have too much to figure out after securing the Stanley Cup a few weeks back, with just three players on expiring deals and essentially a fully flushed out roster already set.
One of the biggest question mark remaining though is the fate of Russian defenseman Alexander Nikishin.
The rookie blueliner is in need of a new deal, but his name has also been coming up a lot in the recent days in trade chatter.
"We're always looking to make the team better and the situation right now is that everybody on the team is under contract aside from one or two players," said Carolina general manager Eric Tulsky. "So that focuses a lot of the conversations there. We are looking at everything we can to make the team better. He was a big piece of our team this past year and maybe a big piece going forward."
According to Tulsky, the team hasn't really had any serious conversations with Nikishin's representation yet, mostly due to the fact that there's no real time crunch to getting a deal done.
Nikishin is an RFA, meaning that Carolina holds his exclusive rights, and he also does not have arbitration rights, so he can't force a deal to come to fruition through a third-party arbitrator.
"We just finished playing 10 minutes ago and then we're into the draft and free agency," Tulsky said. "There's stuff that is immediately time sensitive after the season, so that was an easy one to kind of put on hold for a couple of weeks and come back to in July. It's easy to punt for a little bit and let the dust settle and take care of the things that are pressing and then figure out where we're going to go from there."
Due to that though, there's been plenty of speculation on whether or not the Hurricanes will actually sign the talented defenseman or perhaps flip him as part of a package for a bigger fish.
"Every single player on our team is an option for a trade if there are ways to get better and naturally, the one that isn't under contract is the one who stirs up a bunch of speculation," Tulsky said. "Our goal is to keep taking steps any way we can and one way that can happen is young players can develop and age and take steps naturally and another is we can look at free agents and trades and look for ways to move forward through acquisitions."
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