Valeri Nichushkin breaks silence on Seattle Hotel incident.

The Colorado Avalanche have had their hands full with forward Valeri Nichushkin and unfortunately for the Avalanche the embattled forward continues to make headlines for all of the wrong reasons.

Nichushkin, who is currently suspended as part of the National Hockey League and National Hockey League Players Association' Player Assistance Program, recently gave an interview to Russian YouTuber Mikhail Cherkasov. That interview occurred prior to the Stanley Cup playoffs, but was recently published online and sees Nichushkin discussing another controversial incident from his career, one that occurred during last year's Stanley Cup playoffs.

Although the interview itself was conducted in Russian, thankfully Evan Rawal of Colorado Hockey Now has been able to have it translated and we can finally hear Nichushkin's perspective of the controversial incident that occurred in a Seattle hotel.

"I had friends in Seattle at that moment and I made the wrong decision, we hung out with them at night and in the morning I flew to Denver," said Nichushkin as per Colorado Hockey Now.

So what about the woman found in Nichushkin's room?

"This girl in my room has nothing to do with me," claimed Nichushkin. "The club advised me not to give any comments, and I myself was not emotionally ready to explain all this. This was probably the wrong decision and it was necessary to tell the whole situation right away so that there weren’t a bunch of different rumors."

Nichushkin even seemed to want to lay at least some of the blame at the feet of the Avalanche themselves, suggesting that his run of injuries that season  had put him in a bad place mentally.

"It was the most difficult season, there were a lot of injuries in the team all season," said Nichushkin. "I missed 2 months due to bursitis. I also had a shoulder injury, which constantly bothered me. I always had problems sleeping, but because of the pain in my shoulder, the situation with my sleep got worse. They did an MRI and they couldn’t decide whether to have surgery or not. In the end, they decided not to do it and gave me injections in my shoulder. These injections stopped helping and they decided to inject me with another drug. When we flew to Seattle, they decided that I would not play the match due to a shoulder injury, because I needed to not bother my shoulder for a while until the drug starts working and everyone on the team knew that I would not play until the end of the round. It put a lot of pressure on the psyche and was very annoying."

It was after all this that Nichushkin says he had his lapse in Seattle. The Avalanche have chosen not to respond to these comments from the player.

I suspect these answers won't do much to alleviate the concerns that fans have had over the controversial incident, especially not given the additional troubles that Nichushkin has since found himself in. The Avalanche were left devastated when they learned that Nichushkin had been placed in Stage 3 of the Player Assistance Program just moments before Game 4 of their second round series against the Dallas Stars, a move that came with a 6 month suspension without pay for Nichushkin before he can be eligible for reinstatement.