The Syracuse Crunch, AHL affiliate of the Lightning, signed former Penguins prospect Nikita Pavlychev to a one-year AHL contract, Syracuse general manager Stacy Roest announced on Tuesday.
Pavlychev, the Penguins' seventh-round pick in 2015, became an unrestricted free agent on Saturday when he was not signed by the 5 p.m. deadline.
Pavlychev was offered an AHL-level contract with Wilkes-Barre/Scranton but did not accept, as Dave Molinari reported in a Friday Insider.
“We’d like him to stay with us,” a Penguins source said of Pavlychev. “But being that it’s taken this long, he may go a different route.”
With the forward depth Wilkes-Barre had last year, good players and even draft picks like Justin Almeida and Jan Drozg were getting sent down to Wheeling for playing time. Wilkes-Barre already has nine forwards under contract next season (three on AHL deals, six on NHL), two of which primarily play Pavlychev's position of center and fit in the bottom-six (Chase Berger, Jordy Bellerive) where Pavlychev played at Penn State, so Pavlychev may have thought that a lateral move to Syracuse would offer more regular playing time in the role for which he is suited than he would have gotten in Wilkes-Barre.
Pavlychev scored 36 goals and 34 assists in 137 games in his four years at Penn State. At 6-foot-8, 225 pounds, his skating may have been one of the factors that kept him from getting an NHL entry-level contract out of college.
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