Fifty-two. That’s how many American Hockey League players signed with the Swedish Hockey League this offseason, more than double the number who went to Germany’s DEL. Fifty-eight ECHL players landed in Britain’s Elite Ice Hockey League, more than double the number who went anywhere else. And in Russia, the story splits cleanly down the middle: men’s hockey is locked out of the sport’s biggest international events, while the women’s league is actively recruiting the same North American talent the men can no longer showcase on the world stage.
Three separate storylines. One underlying structure.
North American professional hockey has quietly built a second labor market, and it doesn’t run through the NHL. It runs through Stockholm, Mannheim, Nottingham and Bratislava. The number that matters isn’t the size of any single signing. It’s the fact that this now happens at scale, on a schedule, with predictable destinations, every summer.
Let’s take it apart.
Andy Abramson
The Pipeline Has a Shape
Player movement from North America to Europe used to read as anecdote: a fringe NHL prospect takes a KHL paycheck, a fan favorite finishes his career in the Swiss league, a story for the transactions column. That’s not what’s happening anymore.
The 2025-26 offseason data shows something closer to a routed supply chain.
AHL-caliber players go to five leagues, in this order: SHL (52), DEL (24), Liiga (21), Czech Extraliga (15), Swiss NL (15). ECHL-caliber players go to a different five, led by the EIHL (58), then Slovakia (31), Austria’s ICEHL (21), HockeyAllsvenskan (16), Liiga (15) and DEL2 (13).
That’s not randomness. That’s a market that has sorted itself by tier. The SHL has become the AHL’s premium overseas outlet. The EIHL has become the ECHL’s release valve. Players aren’t scattering across Europe looking for whoever will take them. They’re being placed, systematically, into leagues calibrated to their level of North American minor-pro experience.
We’ve all seen enough athlete deals get structured over the years to recognize what this looks like from the outside: an efficient market finding its clearing price. Somebody built the pipes. The player agents and European GMs who move this inventory now know exactly where an AHL depth forward or a starting ECHL goalie belongs, and they move him there without much drama.
The Real Product Isn’t Ice Time. It’s Certainty.
Here’s the part the transactions column leaves out: why is a player who could keep grinding for an NHL call-up choosing Sweden instead?
Money is part of it, but not in the way people assume. The AHL generally pays between $50,000 and $150,000 a year, with two-way contracts that can pay a fraction of that when a player is stuck in the minors. Top SHL and KHL contracts run $100,000 to $500,000. The bands overlap in the middle and Europe’s ceiling is three times the AHL’s.
The AHL’s $150,000 ceiling sits below the SHL’s $100,000 floor for top talent. A player chasing his NHL card in North America can be outbid by a European club offering a defined role and a guaranteed number.
But the bigger variable is role. An AHL veteran in his late twenties is fighting for third-line minutes behind a pipeline of twenty-two-year-old prospects the organization is contractually obligated to develop. That same player, in the SHL or DEL, is sold to fans as a top-six forward or a number-one defenseman. He plays power play. He plays penalty kill. He gets a name on the marquee instead of a number on a call-up list.
That’s the trade a lot of these players are actually making: uncertain NHL upside, three years from now, at league minimum if it happens at all, versus a certain, well-paid, meaningful role, starting now, somewhere his family can plan around.
Noah Philp signed with HV71 in June and then retired in August, before ever playing a game. That’s not a footnote. That’s the risk on the other side of this trade: European clubs can win the negotiation and still lose the player, because a contract solves for money and role, not for whether a twenty-six-year-old actually wants to move his life to central Sweden.
Who Else Is Moving, and Why It Confirms the Pattern
The individual signings read as a checklist of the same logic playing out at different altitudes.
Patrick Brown left NHL free agency for Adler Mannheim in the DEL rather than take another two-way NHL deal. Calle Clang signed with Rögle in the SHL as a starting goaltender rather than compete for a backup job. Matej Blumel moved from the NHL market to HC Sparta Praha in the Czech Extraliga. Victor Söderström signed with EHC Biel-Bienne in the Swiss NL. Tristen Robins, a former second-round pick, left the Czech league itself for a bigger role with IF Björklöven in the SHL, meaning the SHL is now pulling talent even from within Europe’s own tiered system.
Then there’s Case McCarthy, who spent two seasons grinding through North American minor pro before signing with Stavanger Oilers in Norway’s Metal Ligaen. That signing barely registers as news. It’s exactly the kind of transaction that used to be invisible and is now part of a documented, repeatable flow.
None of these are NHL stars taking a KHL retirement paycheck. They’re a working-pro population making a rational career decision, and enough of them are making the same decision that it shows up as a pattern in the data rather than a series of one-offs.
The Reverse Flow Is Real, Just Smaller
Europe isn’t only exporting NHL dreams into minor-league reality. It’s also producing players who go the other direction. Charle-Édouard D’Astous went from Brynäs to Tampa Bay. David Tomášek went from Färjestad to Edmonton. Josh Samanski went from Straubing to Edmonton. Vitaly Pinchuk, playing for Dinamo Minsk in the KHL, is being scouted as a legitimate NHL target for 2026.
These are proof that the SHL and DEL function as a real developmental tier, not a retirement home. A player who dominates in Europe can still get an NHL contract off the strength of that performance. But the volume runs one direction. Dozens of AHL and ECHL players are heading to Europe every summer; the return trips are a handful of names a year. The pipeline has a valve, not a two-way door.
Russia’s Split Personality
Everything above describes an open, liquid market. Russia is the opposite case, and it’s split in two different directions depending on which half of the sport you’re looking at.
On the men’s side, the IIHF Council upheld its ban on Russian national teams for the 2026-27 season in late July, keeping Russia out of the 2027 Men’s World Championship, the World Junior Championship, and both U18 tournaments, citing ongoing safety, security and sporting integrity concerns. The Russian Federation is appealing to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. That appeal has not worked in any prior cycle since the ban began in 2022.
Here’s the part that makes this interesting rather than just sad: the ban is now oddly specific. The IOC provisionally lifted its suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee in July, ahead of the 2028 Summer Games. Russian players will be on the ice at the NHL All-Star Game as part of a “World” roster alongside Canada, Finland, Sweden and the United States. Russia is being reintegrated into the Olympics and into the NHL’s own marquee event. It’s only the IIHF’s sanctioned international competitions, specifically, where the door stays shut.
That’s not a blanket exile. That’s a governing body drawing a line its peer organizations aren’t drawing, and it puts the IIHF in an increasingly isolated position, which is its own story worth watching. When the entity issuing the ban is more restrictive than the IOC, the ban starts to look less like consensus and more like institutional inertia.
The practical effect for player movement: Russian men’s talent has lost its highest-visibility international showcase, which was historically a scouting funnel into European and North American leagues. KHL clubs are responding by keeping their own players home rather than losing them to a diminished market. Nikita Nesterov extended at CSKA. German Rubtsov extended at Spartak. This is consolidation, not migration.
On the women’s side, the opposite is happening. The KHL and the Russian Women’s Hockey League are actively signing North American players for 2026-27 under standardized contracts and transfer protocols. Where men’s Russian hockey is closing itself off from the outside world, women’s Russian hockey is opening itself to it, using imported talent as a deliberate strategy to raise the on-ice product.
Same country, same sport, same year. One half is retreating into isolation. The other half is recruiting.
The Structural Read
Step back and the three storylines resolve into one argument: player movement in hockey is no longer just about the NHL. It’s about the health of a second, self-sustaining market underneath it, and that market has rules of its own.
That second market rewards certainty over ceiling. It rewards leagues that offer real roles over leagues that offer theoretical ones. And it punishes governing bodies, like the IIHF on the men’s international side, that keep their doors closed after every other institution around them, the IOC, the NHL, has started opening theirs.
The AHL and ECHL were built to feed one league. They’re now feeding two.
What I’d Watch
The SHL’s pull on AHL talent is going to keep compounding as long as North American two-way contracts keep paying like they’re an audition rather than a career. If I’m running player development for an NHL organization, that HV71 retirement is the story I’m studying, not the Rögle signing. A club can win the negotiation and still lose the asset if it doesn’t solve for whether the player actually wants the life that comes with the contract.
And on the Russia side, the widening gap between the IOC’s posture and the IIHF’s posture is what eventually forces a resolution, one way or the other. Institutions that get out of step with their peers don’t usually stay out of step forever.