MOSCOW, January 22 Captain of the Ufa club of the Continental Hockey League ( KHL) «Salavat Yulaev» Grigory Panin left a memorial skate in the cemetery at the grave of ex-team player Rodion Amirov.
Amirov died in August 2023. He was 21 years old. He was buried in the village of Bogdanovka, Ishimbay district in Bashkiria.
“Today I went to see Rodion Amirov at the cemetery, left a skate with number 27 there. I have a big request — don’t take it, please, let it stay there in memory of him,” Panin said in a video published on Telegram — channel «Salavat Yulaev».
In February 2022, the Toronto Maple Leafs, who selected the forward in the first round of the 2020 National Hockey League (NHL) draft 15th overall, announced that Amirov had been diagnosed with a brain tumor.
Amirov became the silver medalist of the 2019 Junior World Championship as a member of the Russian national team, and also managed to play for the main national team, with which he won the Finnish stage of the Euro Hockey Tour — the Karjala Cup — in 2020. He made his debut for Salavat Yulaev in 2019. In total, Amirov took part in 79 matches for the Ufa club, in which he scored 18 points (10 goals + 8 assists).