Warning, long winded post. TLDR: Michkov's buy-out may be $250k-$583k, depending on when he buys it out. It's likely it makes more financial sense for him to buy it out as soon as possible rather than wait.
From my digging the $600k is at today's exchange rate if he buys out the rest of the contract from the end of this season.
When I first made my post speculating about his contract status I couldn't find a breakdown of compensation. This time around I found a breakdown of his contract provided by a long-time hockey reporter at Championat.com. I don't know of the legitimacy of them as a news source, but from looking at the website rankings it apparently has the second largest market share of online sports news in Russia.
The breakdown is provided in
this article. His KHL salary, expressed in rubles, is broken down as follows:
2021-22: ₽5 million
2022-23: ₽10 million
2023-24: ₽15 million
2024-25: ₽25 million
2025-26: ₽30 million
Unfortunately the details of contract buy-outs from the KHL are scarce. However, when Radulov left the KHL to re-join Nashville, it was reported by then KHL-president Alexander Medvedev that a player must
pay 2/3s of the remaining contract.
So the breakdown of buy-out values, based on the above two sources would be:
Before 2023-24 season: ₽46.6 million
Before 2024-25 season: ₽36.6 million
Before 2025-26 season: ₽20.0 million
Exchange rate is volatile right now between rubles and USD, but I'll use todays rate of 1 USD = 80 rubles for simplicity sake. That makes the value of a buy-out the following:
Before 2023-24 season: $583k
Before 2024-25 season: $485k
Before 2025-26 season: $250k
Using Slafkovsky's ELC as a proxy, he could expect the annual compensation breakdown:
Annual base salary: $855,000
Annual signing bonuses: $95,000
Annual performance bonuses: $3,500,000
I did some simple calcs based on this to estimate his cashflow pre-2026 based on a buy-out each year. I ignored performance bonuses because it's got a massive varying outcome of possibilities, though based on his pedigree I guessed he'd probably hit his schedule A bonuses giving him an extra million annually. I kept his KHL salary until he bought out in the scenarios below. Didn't account for things like taxes and escrow.
Buy-out 2023: $2.27 million
Buy-out 2024: $1.63 million
Buy-out 2025: $1.01 million
The thing that jumps out to me is that his earnings before 2026 drops every year he stays in the KHL. Or in otherwards, he's actually financially incentivized to buy out his contract as fast as possible. This stance is only further enhanced when you add in ELC performance bonuses, and consider that the faster he can burn his ELC, the faster he will get to his first large NHL contract.