FN’s mid-season Flames prospect updates: Nick Cicek

If you had told me a year ago that we would be sitting here mid-season having written multiple rave reviews of Calgary Wranglers blueliner Nick Cicek, I would have been a bit surprised.

That’s no knock on Cicek. While I wasn’t overly familiar with his game prior to his arrival in Calgary after a year playing in Germany, I had seen him on occasion and heard good things from folks I knew who cover the San Jose Sharks.

It’s just that on paper, there were players that would probably take up more of our attention when it came to the Wranglers blueline. Among them? Ilya Solovyov, Yan Kuznetsov and Hunter Brzustewicz, and we were holding out hope for either a Jeremie Poirier bounce-back or an Etienne Morin break-through season.

But some stuff happened this season for the Wranglers’ blueline.

• Ilya Solovyov was claimed off waivers by Colorado before the season began.
• Yan Kuznetsov was summoned to the NHL a month into the season and found a rhythm with MacKenzie Weegar.
• Hunter Brzustewicz impressed to the point where he’s spent about half the season in the NHL.
• Jeremie Poirier did not rebound and was traded to Dallas.
• Etienne Morin had some growing pains adjusting to the checking aspects of an AHL blueline role and has been the team’s seventh defender for a good chunk of the season.

In the midst of a noisy AHL blueline, here’s 25-year-old Cicek to calm things down and give the Wranglers whatever they need. Need him to play either side of any pairing? The lefty can flex to play the right or the left, depending on the partner. Need him to generate offence? Sure. Need him to kill penalties. Gotcha. Need him to compliment puck-movers like Brzustewicz, Morin, Poirier or Zayne Parekh? You got it. Need him to be a shutdown pairing with Turner Ottenbreit? Absolutely.

Cicek isn’t the sexiest name in the system. He’s not a high draft choice. He spent last year playing for Adler Mannheim in the Deutsche Eishockey Liga (DEL). You could be forgiven if you didn’t get overly excited for his free agent signing by the Flames on July 1.

But in a year where a lot of weird stuff has gone wrong in the Flames organization, especially on the blueline, we can’t say enough good things about what Cicek has given the Wranglers. He’s gone from someone we kinda sorta remembered from his days in the Sharks system to someone that seems important to keep around as the team brings a slew of young faces into the pro system over the next few seasons.