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NHL players tend to have a superhuman ability to battle through adversity in order to take the ice—especially during the Stanley Cup Playoffs—so learning Valeri Nichushkin had left the Avalanche in the middle of the postseason was a pretty surprising development. There were plenty of questions surrounding the incident that led to his departure, but the forward doesn’t seem too eager to answer any of them.
For the uninitiated, the Avalanche were facing off against the Kraken in the first round of the playoffs back in April when the team announced Nichushkin had taken a leave of absence for unspecified “personal reasons.”
However, things took a turn when we learned the man who’d played on a broken foot during the Stanley Cup Finals in 2022 had been linked to an incident at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seattle where police and paramedics were called to attend to an intoxicated woman who was discovered in his room.
In June, Seattle police released body cam footage captured by an officer who arrived at the scene that showed an off-duty Denver cop insisting nothing criminal had occurred (no charges were filed against anyone involved).
The video also shows the unidentified woman in question (who was born in Ukraine but resides in Russia—where Nichushkin also hails from) in the back of an ambulance while insisting an unspecified “bad” and “crazy” person had taken possession of her passport.
Nichushkin left Seattle for Denver shortly after the incident unfolded, and on Thursday, he (sort of) broke his silence while addressing members of the media who were understandably hoping to get some more information out of him after he arrived at training camp.
According to ESPN, Nichushkin asserted the strange scene boiled down to a “family” matter while imploring the press to move on, saying:
“I know you guys want to find something there but it’s nothing really interesting.
I think we should close it. It’s a new season right now. We have to focus on that.”
It’s not exactly shocking to see an NHL player decline to open up in an interview, but if Nichushkin thinks people are going to simply move on because he suggested that’s the best course of action, he’s probably slightly mistaken.