The deal with Afinogenov is that he thought he was much, much better than he was. He never used his team mates and would always try to go 1 vs 5 every shift. He thought he was a star who should be on the 1st line and Lindy kept trying to reign him him in. It didn't really seem to have anything to do with him being Russian.
Don't know what the deal with Dmitri Kalinin was. He was always a pretty meh player, your typical 4/5/6 defenseman. Maybe he's upset because he slugged it through the rough bankruptcy years only to be leapfrogged on the depth chart after the lockout?
I feel like you did enough here in this reply so you can stop thinking about Dmitri Kalinin (unless this is a fun off-season trivia hunt, then by all means have at it!).
I simply did a very a lazy Twitter search of “Nichushkin Ruff” and found these Tweets. I didn’t find any thing to contradict them but I did zero research beyond this.
Nichushkin had an excellent rookie season under Ruff straight out of the draft, playing 79 GP scoring 34 points, with 14 goals, in the regular season plus six PO games (1G 1A).
He unfortunately had hip surgery 5 games into his sophomore season and ended up playing 8 NHL games & 5 AHL games in the regular season.
The bitchfest break-up came next in 2015-16, in his age 20 season. He played 79 games scoring 29 points, with 9 goals, plus 10 PO games (1A).
He was scratched in 3 playoff games and maybe all 3 of those regular season games? He was 20 year old player who missed a season.
At times his ice time dropped & he played on a bottom line and he got “frustrated”.
Just to be clear, there’s zero chance Ruff had any problems with the kid. He thought he was super talented.
There’s also a very good chance that a 27 year old Nichushkin views this as water under the bridge and realizes he played quite a bit as kid right out of the draft.
He came back to Dallas when Jim Montgomery was the coach. He only played 59 games (while getting scratched a lot), “scored” 10 assists while averaging 11:55 TOI, which was 2 minutes less than he got under Ruff. He played in 1 of Dallas’ 13 playoff games and then they bought his ass out.
So Montgomery is definitely a worse coach hire if we want to woo Nuke lol. I think a heartfelt phone call from Ruff probably could patch up any lingering awkwardness. “Probably” because that’s just going by reasonable human behavior. Who the hell knows, obviously a clean slate is, uh, cleaner.
I still think we should gild the lily by getting a Russian assistant in NHL as well as having one in the AHL (either give Sarge a bigger title in the AHL or kick him upstairs and replace him down there).
Sharangovich and even Maltsev are enough to sell me on having someone can speak these kids’ language. We drafted a bunch of players out of Russia, including a signed 1st round pick and KHL scoring stud, it would behoove us to continue to find ways to make us organizationally adept at developing them.
I sort of forgot that Brylin is one of the few Russian players with 3 Stanley Cup Rings (one of four I guess? As of now lol) until Sharangovich was ohhing and ahhing over it at the exit interviews. (Not that any player wouldn’t find that legit as f***, but it would be cooler to a Russian prospect for obvious reasons and he won them all here. Because it’s awesome here, tell your friends lol.)
