According to a report, Alexei Kolosov, the Philadelphia Flyers’ top goalie prospect, bailed on the team and slept through his flight instead of showing up to development camp earlier in the month as originally planned.
According to a report from Ivan Bogun via Belarus Hockey and Telegram, Kolosov was supposed to arrive in North America for the Flyers’ annual development camp, which ran from July 2 to July 6, “accidentally” overslept for his flight and has since asked his old KHL club, Dinamo Minsk, to assist him with terminating his NHL contract with Philadelphia.
“Alexei Kolosov is the strangest guy. Sign a rookie contract to run home in a couple of months and refuse to return to the location Philadelphia is, of course, the upside of infantilism,” wrote Bogun. “I heard that the goalkeeper has already asked the management of Minsk to do everything to help solve the issue of termination of the contract in the NHL. The funny thing is that he was supposed to fly to Pennsylvania on June 20, according to the tickets purchased by the Flyers, but ‘completely by chance’ overslept the flight and stayed in Belarus.
“Now it is interesting to see how the Minsk residents will solve Kolosov’s request, after which they withdrew from the negotiations on the acquisitions of Ilya Konovalov and Sergei Murashov. And it’s even more interesting to know what the agent (Alijosa Pliko) thinks about all this.”
Please note that the above translations were from Russian to English, and because there are no direct translations for certain Cyrillic words to English and vice versa, they may not be 100% accurate.
Additionally, Mikhail Zislis reported that Kolosov was spotted training with Dinamo Minsk on Tuesday. Some photos of the Flyers prospect training in Lehigh Valley Phantoms and Flyers gear have surfaced, but beyond that, any reasons to believe that Kolosov is returning are rapidly eroding.
Adding some credence to Bogun’s report is the fact that the Flyers’ official Twitter (or X) account had posted an image of the development camp roster that listed Carson Bjarnason and Kolosov as the two goalies, but the post was promptly deleted. This was either a clerical error or a pre-planned post, and the latter now seems more likely.
Minsk forward Vladislav Kodola also echoed the Kolosov rumors a few weeks back, claiming that the 22-year-old told him that the KHL was better than the AHL, leaving Kodola uncertain as to whether he would return to North America or not.
Not long after, I had the opportunity to ask Flyers general manager Danny Briere about Kolosov and if these rumors were a “non-issue”, to which he replied, “Correct. Yeah, I think that’s fair to say. As far as we know, there’s no issue there.”
Roughly two months remain before Kolosov will have to report to North America for the Flyers’ training camp, but at this time, things are not looking up for the Belarusian’s future in Philly.
