The Rangers came out of a brutal 2024-25 season looking for a reset, and this offseason brought plenty of that. Chris Drury’s front office leaned into younger talent, adding 25-year-old Pavel Dorofeyev and 18-year-old Alberts Smits, the fifth overall pick, to a roster that needed a new direction after finishing last in the Eastern Conference and 30th overall in the NHL standings.
But the biggest swing New York almost made never materialized.
On Monday’s episode of the 32 Thoughts podcast, Elliotte Friedman said the Rangers were much closer than most people realized to landing Alexander Nikishin, the 24-year-old Russian defenseman who debuted last season with the Carolina Hurricanes. Nikishin has been in the spotlight lately because he remains unsigned as a restricted free agent, and the holdout has now become real enough that he won’t be in Carolina’s lineup when the Hurricanes open their Stanley Cup defense against the Florida Panthers on Tuesday.
“Nikishin was almost traded to the Rangers,” Friedman said. “They had a deal between the Hurricanes and the Rangers, and they couldn’t come to a contract agreement.”
That detail changes the story. This wasn’t just loose speculation or a team doing background work on a possible target. According to Friedman, the framework was there, and the Rangers and Hurricanes were close enough to discuss a trade that would have sent Nikishin to Madison Square Garden.
The road to that point started years earlier. Carolina drafted Nikishin in the third round, 69th overall, in 2020, but he stayed in Russia until 2024-25.
His final three seasons before coming over came with SKA St. Petersburg in the KHL, where he was a KHL First-Team All-Star each year and wore the captain’s “C” for his final two seasons.
Once he got to the NHL, Nikishin showed why his name has carried so much weight. In 81 regular-season games as a rookie last season, he scored 11 goals and totaled 33 points. He added just one assist in 17 playoff games, but the broader picture still made him look like a major piece.
The sticking point, Friedman said, was money.
“The rumor before the [Zeev] Buium contract came in was [Nikishin] was looking for around $9 million a year, and I just don’t think the Rangers got there,” Friedman said.” I don’t think they were far away, but I don’t think they got there.”
That number matters because of what followed elsewhere. Buium, the 12th overall pick by the Minnesota Wild in 2024, was part of the package sent to the Vancouver Canucks in the Quinn Hughes trade and then signed an eight-year, $75.04 million extension in early September. That deal carries an average annual value of $9.38 million.
For New York, the missed opportunity appears to have been tied to the draft floor in June. The Rangers held the fifth pick, while the Hurricanes had the 31st selection at the time. The teams were reportedly close to a deal built around Nikishin and that No. 5 pick, but the contract piece never came together before the Rangers had to make their selection.
Once that door shut, New York moved on. The Rangers took Smits, Carolina dealt its first-round pick for two second-rounders, and the Rangers also added defensemen Sean Durzi and Marcus Pettersson in trades the same day. Those moves addressed two spots in their top four on defense and added $11.5 million in salary.
What was left behind was the sense of a deal that could have changed the look of the Rangers’ blue line. Instead, it stayed a near miss.
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