As the Hurricanes relive 2006, one player remains a refugee living in exile
When the members of the 2006 Carolina Hurricanes gather this weekend to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their championship, not every player on the Stanley Cup will be present. Some are otherwise preoccupied with work, like Kevyn Adams, general manager of the Buffalo Sabres, or with their own kids playing hockey. Josef Vasicek died 14 years ago. Some are just too far afield.
Then there’s Anton Babchuk, who arrived in January of that season as a 21-year-old rookie, a big Ukranian-born defenseman with a big shot. In the group photos on the ice with the Stanley Cup, Babchuk looms in the back, in uniform, his arm around Mike Commodore with a wide grin on his face, very much part of the team.
While he didn’t appear in a playoff game, he still played in 22 games down the stretch — the Hurricanes got special dispensation to add him and Andrew Hutchinson to the engraving — and went on to play another 141 games for the Hurricanes before returning to Russia’s KHL to finish out his career.
As they assembled the group to return this weekend, the Hurricanes couldn’t find Babchuk to invite him.
“That’s the one nobody knew,” a team official said.
Babchuk had seemingly dropped off the face of the earth.
And in a way, he had.
“After two months of living in the basement of our house under missile explosions, we decided to leave Ukraine,” Babchuk wrote in an email to The News & Observer. “We have been living in Spain for the fourth year now.”
Even professional athletes who made millions playing in North America are not immune to the whims of international politics and the ravages of war. Babchuk played for the Russian national team as a teenager and in the KHL as a pro, but he was Kiev-born and raised, growing up alongside another future NHLer, Nikolai Zherdev.
A first-round draft pick of the Chicago Blackhawks in 2002, his hockey career took him around the world until he retired in 2015, moving back to Kiev with his wife and two sons. Russia was already waging a proxy war with Ukraine then, but far from the cosmopolitan capital.
“Everything was going very well, the children played football in the Dynamo Kiev team, my wife and I ran our own business and lived our happy life,” Babchuk wrote.
Then the war came home with the Russian invasion in February 2022 and the constant bombing of cities like Kiev. Eventually, Babchuk and his family fled to Spain — first Valencia, and now Villareal. It’s safe to say they are not only fortunate to make that escape but also making the best of a bad situation. Their eldest son Anton, 15, recently signed a pro soccer contract with La Liga club Villareal, the famous Yellow Submarine. Their younger son Platon, 12, is playing for another soccer club nearby.
But if that’s a long way from Raleigh and this weekend’s celebration of a long-ago championship, no less fondly remembered with the passing of time, it’s an even longer way from Ukraine. Amid the good memories and better vibes of a time when the Hurricanes owned the hockey world, spare a thought for one player who won’t be there because the rest of the world can be a cruel place.
“My wife Natalia and I try to help our children grow up to be happy and worthy people,” Babchuk wrote. “That’s how we live. We are very much looking forward to all this horror in Ukraine to end soon and we will be able to come to our beloved city Kiev.”
Don’t we all.
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This story was originally published December 7, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
