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Top Flames stories of 2024: The NHL finally took the retired Russians out of the database
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Photo credit: Sergei Belski-Imagn Images
Ryan Pike
Dec 27, 2024, 10:00 ESTUpdated: Dec 25, 2024, 12:31 EST
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Welcome to our countdown of the top Calgary Flames news stories of 2024, where we will be counting down our most-read stories of the year in the days leading up to 2025.
Folks, sometimes there are things we find weird and interesting that we’re not entirely sure that our readers will find interesting – but we hope they will. Well, one of our most-read and best-received pieces was one of the oddest things we’ve ever run.
This September, the NHL finally took all the retired Russian players out of their database.
There’s no transfer agreement between the NHL and the Russian national federation, so there’s nothing officially structuring when a drafted Russia player’s NHL rights lapse. As a result, when a Russian player is drafted by an NHL club, that club maintains their rights forever. (Unless they trade them.)
And so every team’s list of scratches during the pre-season included all their players under active contracts, all their unsigned college, junior and European players… and a gigantic list of every Russian player the team had selected since the mid-90s. That is, until this year when the database was purged.
Here’s how we phrased it in September:
Friends, the National Hockey League’s pre-season can be a lot of fun. The games aren’t really high stakes. You get to see top prospects (and obscure try-out players) dip their toes into the NHL game a bit. And the NHL’s official roster sheets feature everybody on an NHL team’s training camp roster and reserve list, resulting in comedically-long lists of scratched players.
However, this year, the lists of scratches are a little bit shorter, as it appears that the NHL has finally removed long-retired Russian players from their databases (and, by extension, the clubs’ reserve lists). In the case of the Calgary Flames, this means that seven long-gone Russian prospects aren’t listed as pre-season scratches anymore.
The removed players for the Flames were Victor Bobrov (drafted 2002), Andrei Medvedev (2001), Dmitri Riabykin (1994), Egor Shastin (2001), Andrei Taratukhin (2001), Yuri Trubachev (2001) and Ruslan Zainullin (2000; rights acquired from Atlanta). The only one of these players that ever played games under a Flames contract in North America was Taratukhin, who played one season in the American Hockey League for the Omaha Ak-Sar-Ben Knights.
You can read the full story by clicking here, and be sure to tune in each day until Dec. 31 for the rest of our countdown!

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