Tim Donnelly & Dennis Cox discuss how the market for NHL Defensemen continues to rise during the 2026 NHL Free Agency period, and how this impacts how Carolina Hurricanes general manager Eric Tulsky must navigate how he handles RFA Defenseman Alexander Nikishin.
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He should sign a bridge deal. We have players ahead of him in the next 2 years we want to extend. How much do you sacrifice?
We got " steals" on guys cause they were distressed assets and Nikishin isn't , Chatty was a reclamation project prospect buried in Vancouver and Ghost and Walker were seen as not great in their last stops and weren't big commodities in free agency . You can't expect Nikishin or any other young hot shot player to play for reclamation project prices when every other team is paying top dollar , Out defense is aging fast and Ghost and Chattyare going to be UFA soon and you can bet theyll get a lot more this time around from other teams . We have prospect D who can play but everyone is looking for some 35-37 year old to come in here instead its mind boggling and I don't know why we spend so much draft capital every year on guys trading picks to get even more when theyll never get to play here and they'll languish in the AHL forever .
How is 5 seasons 350+ games in the the NHL (Schneider) in the same neighborhood as 1 season and 81 games in the NHL (Nikishin)? Don't tell me you're saying the KHL is equal to the NHL. Even so your argument would be less favorable to Nikishin because he was scoring over 0.8 points per game in the KHL but last season in the NHL he only scored around 0.4 points per game. Get out of here, they are not anywhere near each other. Nikishin is a good player, and it looked like he was finally learning the Carolina style at the end of the season, but a one year NHL player is not getting over $5M. This is why you are on the radio talking and not making financial decisions.
The problem is that you just can’t trade him for nothing. You got getting something of equal value coming back
We all have to remember that Nikishin is young and our older D-men were riddled with injuries this past season. Slavin barely played, Miller and Ghost constantly battled injuries. And no player on the Canes have a slap shot like Nikki. And besides Walker, none of our Dmen body check like Nikki. We need to keep the only big physical Dman we have.