We’ve spent much of the summer talking about the various rumored dramas around newly signed goaltender prospect Alexei Kolosov, who’s been locked in a bit of a will he-won’t he be back for next season limbo, and the latest installment of this saga is certainly not an overly positive one, with a report coming out this morning that Kolosov is looking to be loaned back to Dinamo Minsk of the KHL, rather than returning to Lehigh Valley with the Phantoms.
And while the line from the Flyers up until this point has been that they’re expecting to see Kolosov back with them in North America this season and that they’ll see where things go from there, this report coming on the heels of the news that Kolosov has switched agencies — away from the one which represents both Ivan Fedotov and Matvei Michkov — would suggest that things are moving are moving in the wrong direction here.
So what does this all mean? While it’s easy to jump to the worst case scenario on this one and assume that this all means that the relationship between Kolosov and the Flyers has fractured completely, it’s beyond the point of repairing, and this failing organization will be forced to part with another bright young asset for less than their value, this doesn’t have to be the truth. A single-season loan back to Minsk for Kolosov could end up being a fine thing — he goes back home, gets a ton of playing time, gets a chance to reset a bit, and now that he has a taste of what a move over to North America will be like, he can have a chance to better prepare himself mentally for it. And then when everyone has had a chance to settle in again, a potential move back to Philadelphia (or Allentown) can be started anew.
In any event, if a loan does go through, the Flyers seem to have been preparing for that possibility, and the stockpile of goaltender depth they’ve amassed should leave both the NHL squad and the Phantoms in fine shape to head into the season. It’s a hiccup in what seemed to be a promising situation, to be sure, but it doesn’t have to be a death knell. But we’ll see where things go from here.
