The Carolina Hurricanes have had to navigate through some choppy waters to start the 2023–24 season after losing their affiliation with the AHL’s Chicago Wolves over the summer.
The ‘Canes are the only NHL club without an AHL affiliate, which has resulted in them making some unusual transactions — including loaning top goaltending prospect Pyotr Kochetkov to the Tampa Bay Lightning farm club to get playing time.
Other prospects, including Noel Gunler, Alexander Pashin, and Aleksi Heimosalmi, are old enough to play in the AHL while on their entry-level contracts with the Hurricanes but have instead been loaned back to clubs in Europe.
As Frank Seravalli noted on Tuesday’s edition of "Daily Faceoff Live," the Hurricanes are actively working on a long-term solution to this problem, but it won’t be easy to find a short-term fix:
Tyler Yaremchuk: It’s kind of been percolating under the radar, the Carolina Hurricanes, they’re the only NHL team without an AHL affiliate this season. What’s going on there?
Frank Seravalli: It’s certainly been a slog, and I think when you look at places that they’ve placed some of their players, this is a lot less than an ideal situation for Carolina. They’ve had a couple of prospects go back over and play in Europe, which they seem to be OK with. They might not have a complete handle on the development path when players are over in Europe but they’re trying to make the best of a bad situation. They were linked up with Chicago last year, but that fell apart, they actually learned about the Chicago Wolves cutting ties with them on an affiliation agreement when they read about it in the media, and they’ve made a push, actually, and Scott Howson, the AHL commissioner, mentioned this at the NHL’s last Board of Governors meeting on October 4: If anyone is interested in selling their AHL franchise, the Carolina Hurricanes are open and willing to pay much more than the last AHL franchise transaction, which sold at $11.8M.
So they’re ready to buck up and pay, they’d love to have this settled. The problem is, there’s no short-term fix. They went to the AHL this past summer and tried to convince the league to expand by one additional team and they said, "No, no, we’re not going to go to 33 teams, there’s only 32 NHL teams." So that was a no. And now the Hurricanes are trying to convince someone else to sell. 21 of the 32 AHL franchises are owned by an NHL team, so yes, less than ideal to have Pyotr Kochetkov, the guy that they think could play a big part on their team in the near-term future as a goalie, playing for the Syracuse Crunch, who are the Tampa Bay Lightning affiliate, but look, they’re trying to find an answer, haven’t come up with one yet.
Watch the full episode here:
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