After officially announcing his retirement yesterday, Pavel Datsyuk has signed on with SKA Saint Petersberg of the KHL for $4.8MM. After breaking the dollar amount in early June, KHL insider Aivis Kalniņš now tweets out that it’s a done deal.
Terms of the deal haven’t been announced, but many have thought that SKA would offer an open-ended deal to one of the country’s most storied athletes. Datsyuk is returning home to be closer to his daughter and to play out the rest of his career after an exceptional stay in the NHL.
A veteran of 953 NHL games, Datsyuk scored 314 goals and racked up 918 points as one of the most exciting players in the game. He helped the team to two Stanley Cups and never missed the playoffs in his 14-year career.
He’ll now be joining a team that has many former NHL players, including Ilya Kovalchuk, Alexei Ponikarovsky and Dmitri Kalinin. The SKA squad were the 2014-15 champions, and lost in the third round this past season.