> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.keeganthecaniac.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # A Canes Goalie Just Signed in Shanghai. He's Moving to Russia. - URL: https://www.keeganthecaniac.com/a-canes-goalie-just-signed-in-shanghai-hes-moving-to-russia/ - Published: 2026-08-12T02:56:53.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-12T02:56:53.000Z - Author: Keegan # Amir Miftakhov signed a two-year deal with the Shanghai Dragons last week. He spent last season in our system with the Chicago Wolves and never got a call-up, so this is a reasonable move for a 26-year-old goalie who was very good in the KHL before he came over. He's the second Hurricanes-adjacent player to sign there this summer. Givani Smith went in July. Kevin Labanc, who was in Carolina's camp on a PTO last fall, signed there too. None of them are going to China. ## The team plays in St. Petersburg The Shanghai Dragons play their home games at SKA Arena in St. Petersburg, Russia. Capacity 22,500 — the largest hockey venue on the planet. That is roughly four thousand miles from Shanghai. They haven't played a game in China since 2020\. The current plan is to return in 2027-28, which is the same kind of plan they've had for a while now. ## How this happened The franchise was created in 2016 for one reason: China had been awarded the 2022 Winter Olympics and needed a men's hockey team that wouldn't embarrass them. You can't build a national program in six years from nothing, so the solution was to put a club in the KHL, stock it with imports and heritage players, and use it as a de facto national team. It worked about as well as you'd expect. China lost their Olympic games by a combined score of something like 23-2, and most of the roster was North Americans with a Chinese grandparent. They were Kunlun Red Star then. Based in Beijing, sort of — they also played games in Shanghai and Shenzhen because the Beijing building kept getting booked for concerts. Then COVID hit, they relocated to Mytishchi, a suburb of Moscow, and stayed there for six seasons. In August 2025 they rebranded as the Shanghai Dragons and moved to St. Petersburg. So the timeline is: a Chinese team, created for the Chinese Olympics, that played four seasons in China, then six in a Moscow suburb, and has now been renamed for a city it doesn't play in and moved to a different Russian city entirely. ## The roster part is the real answer Here's the number that tells you everything. In their final season as Kunlun Red Star, the team did not have a single China-born player on the roster. Not one. Six guys had Chinese heritage — the Foo brothers, Lucas Lockhart, Brandon Yip, Tyler Wong, Austin Wong — and all of them were raised in North America. Chris Chelios's kid played for them. Chris Chelios has no Chinese ancestry whatsoever and represented China at the Beijing Olympics. And as of 2024, China's actual national team stopped using naturalized players. So the KHL's Chinese franchise has no Chinese players, doesn't play in China, and no longer feeds the national program it was built to feed. ## So how popular is hockey in China? That's your answer. One team, in a league of two dozen, that exists on paper. The honest version is that hockey in China is a real but tiny thing. There are rinks in the big cities and a growing youth program, and the 2022 Olympics did push some money and attention into it. It's not zero. But it's the kind of tiny where a country of 1.4 billion people couldn't produce enough players to fill one professional roster, and had to import Canadians with Chinese last names to field an Olympic team in their own country. For comparison, this franchise has now been in the KHL for ten years and has never won a playoff round. Last season they finished tied for fifth-worst in the league. ## Which brings it back to Miftakhov He's probably going to be their starter, on 45 million rubles a year, playing in front of whatever crowd shows up at a 22,500-seat arena in St. Petersburg to watch a team named after a Chinese city. Their president is Ilya Kovalchuk. Gerard Gallant coached them a season ago. It's one of the stranger operations in professional sports, and the only reason most Canes fans will ever hear about it is that we keep sending them guys who couldn't crack the Wolves' lineup. Good luck to him. Hope he likes Russia, which is where he already was.