Sports · Saginaw
Saginaw Spirit get Nikita Klepov back from the Anaheim Ducks, adding last year’s OHL scoring champion to the league’s top two scorers
SAGINAW — The Anaheim Ducks sent forward Nikita Klepov back to the Saginaw Spirit on Friday, returning the Ontario Hockey League’s reigning scoring champion and rookie of the year to a team that already has the league’s top two scorers.
Klepov, 18, from Deerfield Beach, Fla., started this season in the NHL after Anaheim drafted him 15th overall in the 2026 NHL Draft. He played four games for the Ducks and averaged 13 minutes, 3 seconds of ice time, the OHL said. When he debuted on Oct. 7 against the Edmonton Oilers, at 18 years and 102 days old, he became the youngest player ever to appear in a game for Anaheim.
Now he is back in Saginaw, where he rewrote the club’s rookie record book last winter.
A record rookie season
Klepov led the OHL with 97 points, on 37 goals and 60 assists, in 67 games in 2025-26. That won him the Eddie Powers Trophy as scoring champion and the Emms Family Award as the league’s top first-year player. The OHL says he is only the third player in league history to win the scoring title and rookie of the year in the same season, after Jack Valiquette in 1973-74 and Patrick Kane in 2006-07.
He also took the Jim Mahon Memorial Trophy as the league’s top-scoring right wing and was a finalist for the Red Tilson Trophy as its most outstanding player, according to the Spirit. His 37 goals tied Cole Perfetti’s Spirit rookie record, and his assists and points set new club rookie marks. In international play, he won gold with Team USA at the 2025 Hlinka Gretzky Cup.
The Spirit say Klepov is the fifth top-15 NHL draft pick to come out of Saginaw since 2020, after Perfetti, Pavel Mintyukov, Zayne Parekh and Michael Misa.
What it means for this Spirit team
Saginaw was 6-5 with three overtime or shootout losses through 14 games under first-year head coach Brendan Taylor before Friday night. Scoring had not been the problem. Forwards Dima Zhilkin and Braidy Wassilyn were tied atop the OHL scoring race with 25 points each, 12 goals and 13 assists, according to the league. Zhilkin’s run of games with a goal was already at seven when the Spirit’s five-game win streak ended against Owen Sound on Oct. 18.
Klepov was not in the lineup Friday night, when Barrie goalie Hagan Bach stopped all 32 Saginaw shots in a 2-0 Colts win at the Dow Event Center, according to the league’s game summary. Barrie came in at 2-10-2. Michael Tang scored for the Colts in the first period and Sebastian Mogull in the second, and Stepan Shurygin made 15 saves for Saginaw.
The Spirit are home again on Halloween, Saturday, Oct. 31, at 4 p.m. against the Guelph Storm at the Dow Event Center. After a Nov. 6 trip to London, Saginaw hosts the Erie Otters on Saturday, Nov. 7, at 7:05 p.m., the Brampton Steelheads on Sunday, Nov. 8, at 5:30 p.m. and the Ottawa 67’s on Thursday, Nov. 12, at 7:05 p.m., according to the team’s schedule. The team had not said by Friday night when Klepov would play his first game back.
Sources:
Saginaw Spirit, “Anaheim Ducks reassign forward Nikita Klepov to Saginaw,” Oct. 30, 2026 (awards, Spirit rookie records, Hlinka Gretzky Cup, top-15 picks since 2020), https://chl.ca/ohl-spirit/article/anaheim-ducks-reassign-forward-nikita-klepov-to-saginaw/
Ontario Hockey League, “Reigning scoring champion, OHL Rookie of the Year Nikita Klepov assigned to Spirit,” Oct. 30, 2026 (NHL games and ice time, debut, Spirit record, Zhilkin and Wassilyn, Kane and Valiquette), https://chl.ca/ohl/article/reigning-scoring-champion-ohl-rookie-of-the-year-nikita-klepov-assigned-to-spirit/
Ontario Hockey League, official game report, Barrie 2, Saginaw 0, Oct. 30, 2026, https://lscluster.hockeytech.com/game_reports/official-game-report.php?lang_id=1&client_code=ohl&game_id=29138
Saginaw Spirit, team site schedule and scoreboard (Oct. 30 vs. Barrie; Oct. 31 vs. Guelph; November games), https://chl.ca/ohl-spirit/
Photo: Jfvoll, “Dow Event Center - Interior.JPG,” Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dow_Event_Center_-_Interior.JPG
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