Season review: Barys. Fourth year out of the playoffs, but grounds for cautious optimism

KHL.ru continues its club-by-club review of the 2025/2026 season in Kazakhstan. Barys missed the playoffs for a fourth successive season, but showed some signs of progress compared with last term.

After 2024/2025 brought the worst ever season for Barys, the club seemed at times to be slumbering. The summer saw local players have their contracts extended but for a while it looked like the Kazakhs were planning not only to dispense with imports, but also Russian players. It wasn’t until mid-August that we saw the first new signings, and even they were on try-out contracts. Closer to the start of the season, a group of imports finally arrived and thanks to their efforts, Barys managed to improve on last season. However, it would be hard to say the end result was satisfactory, never mind impressive.

Early in the season, the team suffered due to a serious injury to goalie Nikita Boyarkin, last year’s best player. Olivier Rodrigue was signed as his replacement, but he never made it to Kazakhstan. Despite this, Barys did better than expected in September, winning five out of 10 and taking another game to OT. Much of this success relied on the efforts of a handful of players, as discussed below, as the August rescue team got to work. The difference in productivity between them and the rest of the roster was enormous, but a handful of imports can’t be on the ice all the time so even their efforts would not always bring results. That was evident in October, when Barys lost10 games, but albeit eight of them by narrow margins.

Those 10 losses weren’t the low point of the season (after all, as well as a couple of wins, there were four points from OT and shoot-out losses). The real skid came later and lasted about six weeks. It was preceded by something of a Christmas miracle – both good and bad: road wins at tough opponents (Avtomobilist, Dynamo Moscow and Avangard) and home losses to outsiders (Sibir, Sochi and Amur). From Dec. 21 (1-5 vs Sochi) to Feb. 2, Barys lost 15 games out of 17, 13 of them in regulation.

Taking this season in isolation, it’s hard to find positives for Barys. But it’s unfair to view 2025/2026 without a broader context. The team has been on a downward spiral for the past three years, finishing third last, then second last and finally hitting rock bottom. This time, the team was fifth from the basement – not exactly a strong performance, but clearly a step forward. There were five more wins than last season, and eight more in regulation, the team scored 55 more goals and allowed 19 fewer. There’s still a big gap to make up on the top eight (15 points last term), but even that is much less than the 34-point gulf of the previous season.

Best players

Jake Massie
8+17 in 67 games

Only Reilly Walsh (22:25) had more ice time than Massie’s (20:43), and his 123 shots were the best on the team. Other stats stood out: 25 points had him fourth in team scoring and second among defensemen, despite rarely getting on the power play. He also had a +5 coefficient on a team with a -54 goal differential. On top of that, Jake was a key component of one of the best penalty kills in the KHL.

Michael Vecchione
19+27 in 65 games

Barys caught a break with Vecchione. He was initially signed by Traktor, but when Josh Leivo unexpectedly became available to Chelyabinsk, Michael was quickly traded away. And, as mentioned above, Vecchione, with or without the support of his fellow imports, went on to win several games for Barys.

Reilly Walsh
16+30 in 68 games

Defenseman Walsh matched leading forward Vecchione, and was also second in goals on the team. However, he also had the worst coefficient at Barys with -24, tied with Adil Beketayev. That reduces his overall impact somewhere, but his offensive upside compensated for his defensive lapses.

Coaching

Throughout its three-year struggles at the foot of the standings, Barys has hired multiple head coaches: Andrei Skabelka, Galym Mambetaliyev, Oleg Bolyakin, David Nemirovsky, Evgeny Korolyov, Vyacheslav Butsayev and Mambetaliyev again. Mikhail Kravets was the first since Skabelka to complete a full season behind the bench. He picked up 39.71% of the available points. That’s hardly a great return, but still a decent performance given the seriously weakened roster. We’ve already agreed that it makes more sense to view this season in the context of the three-year crisis – and none of Kravets’ predecessors got anywhere near 39%.

Last season’s special teams stood out – no other club had such polar opposites on PP and PK. A 13% power play conversion rate was grim (only Lada was worse, and then by just 0.1%). But a penalty kill of 85.1% was bettered only by Metallurg, and by just 0.2%. In the modern game, teams have assistants dedicated to special teams, so rather than Kravets the plaudits mostly go to Korolyov and the criticism to Alexander Savchenko.  

Best game

In mid-November Lokomotiv was on a run of six wins from seven and topped the Western Conference standings. Barys had lost six from seven, all in regulation, and was second from last in the East. It wasn’t easy to see how the Kazakhs would get anything from their trip to Yaroslavl – but they left with plenty to celebrate. Four unanswered goals, two from a previously misfiring power play, handed the eventual Gagarin Cup winner its heaviest loss of the regular season.

Young players

Barys almost halved the number of young players it used compared with last season, going from 17 to nine. But the ones who featured played a much bigger role on the team, especially 20-year-old Semyon Simonov (12+8), 22-year-old Vsevolod Logvin (9+11) and  Dinmukhamed Kaiyrzhan (8+14). Their productivity was just behind the five imports who, with the exception of Massie, enjoyed far more time on the power play (Logvin, in particular, was only sporadically involved in special teams). Maybe these Kazakh youngsters deserve a bit more faith on the power play, especially when the imports were underwhelming on the PP? After all, in the aforementioned win over Lokomotiv, Simonov got one of the power play goals.

Offseason work

The Kazakhs have already extended several key contracts, including Massie, Walsh, Kaiyrzhan and Tice Thompson. But they’ve lost Torpedo-bound Vecchione and seem likely to lose Mason Morelli, currently a UFA. So far, Logan Day is the only arrival. In a season and a half at Traktor he had a reputation as a normally reliable defenseman, but one who from time-to-time was capable of a costly error. It’s entirely possible that if he reunites with Massie, with whom he previously played in the AHL, that will make Day more consistent. In any event, he will surely improve the Barya defense. Meanwhile, the club needs to replace Vecchione (and probably Morelli). Simply replacing like-for-like probably won’t be enough if the team is to avoid a repeat of last season.