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Nichushkin speaks in Russian interview about the Seattle incident

Theo

Just when I thought things were calming down, a 50-minute interview with Valeri Nichushkin pops up.

In part two of three, Nichushkin speaks with Russian YouTuber Mikhail Cherkasov, who visited Denver just before the NHL playoffs began. That means all of these interviews took place before the Russian forward was placed in phase three of the NHL/NHL Player Assistance Program and suspended for six months. I remember Cherkasov coming into the locker room with his GoPro and talking to the Avalanche forward, as well as Yakov Trenin, who was sitting right next to Nichushkin in the locker room.

In the first part, not much really interesting was discussed, at least not from Avalanche’s point of view, but the second part is about the incident in Seattle last year. I’ve attached the video of the interview, but it’s obviously in Russian.

Rather than guess what was being said, I had someone who speaks Russian translate the statements about Seattle for me and gave me permission to use the translation. Here’s what Val had to say…

“It was the most difficult season, there were a lot of injuries in the team all season. I missed two months because of bursitis. I also had a shoulder injury that was constantly bothering me. I always had trouble sleeping, but because of the pain in my shoulder, my sleep got worse. They did an MRI and couldn’t decide whether to operate or not. In the end, they decided against it and gave me injections in my shoulder. Those injections didn’t help anymore and they decided to inject me with another medication. When we flew to Seattle, they decided that I wouldn’t play because of a shoulder injury because I had to rest my shoulder for a while until the medication worked and everyone on the team knew that I wouldn’t play until the end of the round. That put a lot of pressure on the psyche and was very annoying. I had friends in Seattle at the time and I made the wrong decision, we hung out with them at night and in the morning I flew to Denver. That girl in my room has nothing to do with me. The club advised me not to make any comments and I myself was not emotionally ready to explain all this. That was probably the wrong decision and it was necessary to explain the whole situation immediately so that there would not be many different rumors. If we had made it to the second round, I would have been ready to play.”

I don’t think it’s a secret that Val has battled a lot of injuries this season. Everyone knew about the foot, but he made it pretty clear in the few moments he spoke that he’s battled a lot of other issues throughout the year. This is the first I’ve heard of the shoulder injury, and the first time it affected his ability to play against Seattle. That’s not to say it didn’t happen, just that I didn’t know about it.

Nichushkin can return to the Avalanche at the earliest on November 13th after his suspension expires, but would need approval from the NHL.

There will be more interviews in the future that may be of interest to Avalanche, including more from Nichushkin as well as conversations with Alexandar Georgiev and Nikolai Kovalenko.

A thread where you can follow everything Nichushkin said in the interview can be found here.

I’m at the airport ready to fly to Disneyland for a few days, but if anything comes up, rest assured you’ll find it here at CHN.

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