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Carolina Hurricanes Goalie Leaves the NHL and Signs Multi-Year Deal Overseas
James Guillory-Imagn Images

Former Carolina Hurricanes goaltender Spencer Martin has elected to sign with CSKA Moskva of the KHL this summer, giving up on landing another job in the NHL.

Spencer Martin has never been able to crack the NHL full-time.

He has appeared in a few games in each of the last few seasons, but he's primarily served as a third-string goalie, only getting called up in the case of injuries.

Last season he got into just nine games with the Hurricanes, and only 7 of those were starts.

He went 3-4-1 in those games while posting a 3.89 goals-against-average and a .846 save percentage.

Martin has made 66 career regular-season appearances in the NHL split between the Hurricanes, Canucks, Avalanche, and Blue Jackets.

Of those 66 appearances, 59 were starts. He has a career record of 24-30-8, a goal-against-average of 3.56, and a save percentage of .883.

While the goaltender market was quite thin this summer in terms of free agents, those numbers just aren't really good enough to be appealing to most general managers in the NHL.

Given that Martin is 30 years old, he is a known commodity at this point too, with essentially no room for improvement.

This is probably why the veteran netminder decided to sign a two-year deal in the KHL instead of trying his luck in North America once again.

In fact, it seems that NHL teams would rather give a player like Cayden Primeau a chance, based on the fact that the Hurricanes effectively replaced Martin with him.

As such, we have most likely seen Spencer Martin play his last career NHL game.

Unless he does exceptionally well over the next two years in Russia, don't expect to see his name on the back of an NHL jersey anytime soon.

This article first appeared on House of Hockey and was syndicated with permission.

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