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Shocker: Ottawa won’t make qualifying offer to Filatov

According to Steve Lloyd of TEAM 1200 Ottawa, Senators GM Bryan Murray has severed ties with Nikita Filatov.

“He signed [in Russia],” Murray said in explaining why he’s not going to make Filatov a qualifying offer. “He made the decision.”

The news hardly comes as a surprise. In May, Filatov signed a two-year deal with Salavaty Yulaev of the KHL, essentially severing whatever ties he had left to the NHL.

That decision came after Filatov already spurned the Ottawa organization in December, by not reporting for assignment to AHL Binghamton.

If this is indeed the final nail in Filatov’s NHL coffin, it leaves a legacy of unfulfilled promise. The highly-skilled Russian -- taken ahead of Erik Karlsson, Cody Hodgson, Tyler Myers, Jordan Eberle and Michael Del Zotto at the ’08 draft -- initially drew comparisons to Ilya Kovalchuk and broke onto the scene by scoring in his NHL debut, then notching a hat trick four games later.

But rifts with management (most notably in Columbus) and a lack of interest in learning the defensive side of the game became his undoing.

On the plus side, he did give us the “Filly don’t do rebounds” story, which is a beaut.