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What happened next was a lesson in the harsh realities of the NHL.

With Carolina more interested in developing Noah Hanifin, now 20, and Jaccob Slavin and Brett Pesce, both 22, the team didn’t have a need for Wisniewski. He had a professional tryout with the Tampa Bay Lightning. But after missing pretty much the entire season, no one was willing to take a chance on an aging player who was coming off a serious knee injury.

Out of options, Wisniewski signed a contract with Admiral Vladivostok in the KHL, primarily to keep his skills sharp and show general managers he wasn’t just sitting around and doing nothing. He expected to be there about a month; he had an out clause for when — not if — an NHL team came calling.

One month turned into two, then three. No one called. At times, he felt like no one even knew he was still playing. Vladivostok, a port city on the southeastern tip of Russia, wasn’t exactly Siberia, but it might as well have been when you consider how cut off he was from the rest of the country.

“I was practically in China,” said Wisniewski, who had a goal and four points in 16 KHL games. “It was a 45-minute flight to Tokyo and an hour flight to Seoul, South Korea. I’ve never seen travel like that. Our flights to Moscow were 10 hours and then we’d have to switch planes and take a two-hour flight to Minsk, Belarus. We had a 17-hour travel day one day.

“We used to bitch and complain about going to Detroit or out east,” Wisniewski said of his days with the Anaheim Ducks. “That’s a four-hour flight. Big deal. That was like our closest flight in the KHL.”