The Carolina Hurricanes’ handling of Alexander Nikishin has turned into one of the more unusual roster questions around the team.
On one hand, Nikishin checks a lot of boxes. He’s a 6-foot-3, 218-pound defenseman with real bite, the kind of player who earned the nickname “Boom” from parts of the Hurricanes fanbase.
He can move the puck, he can hammer a shot that can get up to 100 mph, and he gave Carolina a weapon from the point in the playoffs. In the 2025-26 regular season, he finished with 33 points, third among Hurricanes defensemen, and became the first rookie defenseman in franchise history to hit 10 goals before ending with 11.
That’s all the kind of production that usually makes a young blueliner feel untouchable. But the Hurricanes have never operated like a team that gets sentimental about its pieces.
General Manager Eric Tulsky has made it clear he wants the 20 best guys in the NHL, and Carolina has been willing to listen when teams check in on Nikishin’s availability. That doesn’t mean the Hurricanes have decided to move on, but it does show they see him as part of a larger roster puzzle rather than a player they have to keep at all costs.
The reason is simple: the defensive numbers have been messy.
According to Natural Stat Trick, only one Hurricanes defenseman who played at least 200 5-on-5 minutes this season posted a worse expected goals against per 60 than Nikishin, and that was Jalen Chatfield. The rookie’s pairing had trouble keeping things tidy in Carolina’s system, and while that system is notoriously difficult to master, the issues went deeper than just a learning curve. Playing with Shayne Gostisbehere also pushed Nikishin into a more defense-first role than he’d probably prefer.
The postseason didn’t clean it up either. Nikishin had the worst 5-on-5 xGA/60 among Hurricanes defensemen in the playoffs.
Still, the gap wasn’t massive. His 2.45 xGA/60 was only 0.02 worse than Gostisbehere’s and 0.10 worse than Chatfield’s.
He wasn’t unusable, and the calls for him to be healthy scratched during the Stanley Cup Final were clearly an overreaction, but the struggles in his own end were real enough to keep the conversation alive.
There’s also the matter of who else is coming. Joel Nystrom was the best Hurricanes defenseman in xGA/60 among players who logged at least 200 minutes in the regular season, and Carolina has other defensive prospects pushing for NHL minutes. Nikishin’s off-side usage makes that path a little easier for the right-side group, which adds another layer to the decision.
Then there’s the market. Friedman noted on the most recent 32 Thoughts Podcast at the time of writing that Nikishin’s contractual ask has scared off a few teams. As a 10.2c RFA, he is not eligible for an offer sheet, which removes one headache for Carolina but leaves the bigger question intact: what is the right price for a player with this blend of tools, production, and defensive inconsistency?
That’s where the Hurricanes are stuck. Nikishin is valuable, but he may also be the easiest of their high-value pieces to move if they decide to chase a bigger fish.
Carolina won’t trade him just to make a move, so any deal would have to make sense for both sides. And for now, that leaves the front office weighing the same question everyone else is asking: sign him, or trade him?
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