Anatoly (or Anatolii) Golyshev says he chased his dream of making it in the NHL, signed a minimum-level contract with the New York Islanders to make it happen, only to realize by the first-quarter mark of his first season in North America that he wasn’t really in the plans.
That can’t be entirely the case, of course: The Isles wouldn’t have bothered to bring the 26-year-old over from the KHL, nor given him a one-way contract, if they never had him in the plans.
But how NHL teams view development and prep for regular NHL duty and how players coming from outside this system view it is not always aligned.