Thought I'd revisit the Nichushkin thing a minute.
Dude has not been seen nor heard from since the incident in Seattle on April 22 before Game 3 of the Kraken-Avs series. The team has refused to comment.
Today the Seattle police released body cam footage of the "extraction" (my term, I'll come back to it) of the young lady ostensibly in Nichushkin's company that afternoon. In the entirety of this footage, she repeatedly references "bad men" who took her passport but never mentions Nichushkin by name. In fact, the only actual evidence of a connection between Nichushkin and this young woman is that the Avs' team physician spoke to those police on that day and provided, in my view, vague information.
The cover story is that Valeri Nichushkin got caught with a woman not his wife in his hotel room on the day of a playoff game. The woman appears to have been intoxicated, but nobody has stated, to my knowledge, that Nichushkin was also. Or that he was actually there, in fact. We are led to believe that because Nichushkin was found in a hotel room with a Ukrainian prostitute, he, the Avs, or both decided he should leave the team "for personal reasons," to do what being unstated or unclear. Nichushkin, one of the team's top four players, was conspicuously absent for the rest of the Avs' losing run in that series, his absence almost certainly resulting in the Avs' loss.
Detox? Six months in the doghouse with his wife? All implied or assumed but if you look closely nobody has really stated any of those things definitively. And none of them stands to reason that a critical member of a professional sports team would disappear from that team in the midst of a playoff run, in my opinion.
The Seattle police say that there was no crime committed or being prosecuted. Which by the way shoots a hole in the Ukrainian prostitute theory because I do believe prostitution is illegal in Seattle.
None of this remotely adds up, and I am fascinated.
I'm going full tin foil hat. My theory is that Nichushkin was or is in trouble or had obligation to the Russian government and/or powerful Russian people. He is no longer in the United States, having been escorted to Russia to attend to whatever obligations he had there. Oh, and nobody in Russia seems to have seen or heard from him since April 22 either, so he might be in prison there or worse.
The Ukrainian prostitute was a cover for Nichushkin's removal, placed there by the people in town to do the job to create a (thin) cover story. Her removal from the situation was a humanitarian extraction by Seattle police to allow her to escape whatever fate awaited her after the Russian mob (or whatever) had acquired Nichushkin and no longer needed her. Since she apparently didn't commit a crime the news media hasn't released her name. But presumably if she is a normal private citizen, many people reporters and otherwise would have approached her for comment which she either would or would not have provided. Yet, after that exact situation ended, she has never been seen nor heard from either.
Prove me wrong.
