For the KHL’s lone Kazakh club, 2024-25 has already been a miserable slog, and the campaign is only a quarter over. We wrote about the firing of head coach David Nemirovsky from Barys Astana here just a few weeks ago, when the team was 1-5 – the club eventually decided to go with a veteran bench boss in Vyacheslav Butsayev, as Nemirovsky’s permanent replacement. Suffice to say, that move has not worked out as hoped.
Barys Astana can now “boast” a 3-13 record, and have been, frankly, a disaster at both ends of the ice. Only Kunlun Red Star, scored-upon 59 times, have conceded more goals than the 56 Barys have given up, and on offence, things have been even worse. Barys have scored 18 goals this season, in 16 games (all stats through October 17th). That’s obviously last in the league by a wide margin – in fact, that’s 12 fewer goals than the next-worse team, and there are only two other teams in the KHL that have not scored twice as many goals as Barys this season. Barys’s d-men have contributed one goal to the cause so far, their leading scorer has a line 3-3-6 in 16 games, and on it goes – “dismal” doesn’t begin to describe it.
The “result of the results,” as it were, has been more changes at Barys, this time starting at the very top; in comes Nurlan Orazbayev as the club’s General Director. Orazbayev is a well-known name in Kazakh hockey circles, and has been for some time. He played for a couple of different Kazakh teams in the lower divisions of the Soviet Championship in the 1980s, before moving on to the administrative side. Orazbayev has long been involved with the national program in Kazakhstan, and this will in fact be his third stint in charge at Barys (his last stint in that role ended in 2015). So he’s a very reasonable choice to try to right the ship.
Orazbayev’s first move, or one of his first moves, has been to carry out Barys’s second head-coaching change of the season. Butsayev has been demoted to assistant coach; that may seem an unusual kind of move to North American hockey fans but is actually not that uncommon overseas. His replacement as head coach is Galim Mambetaliyev, called up from the same role at farm-team Nomad Astana in the Kazakh League; interestingly, Mambetaliyev was briefly a team-mate of Nurlan Orazbayev during their playing days. In any case, Mambetaliyev is a decent-enough choice as head coach, I think. He has 25 years of experience behind various benches, and guided the Kazakh national team to 12th place, and continued participation in the Top Division, at the most recent IIHF World Championships.
But Orazbayev did not stop with changes in the coaching ranks. Today Barys cut ties with Russian forwards Daniil Apalkov and Vladislav Kodola, and Orazbayev stated in an interview that all of the team’s remaining non-Russian foreign players – except for Swedish goalie Johan – will be given their walking papers as well. The players being released include three Americans (Will Butcher, Chase de Leo, and C.J. Smith) along with four Canadians (Wade Allison, Alex Grant, Nathan Beaulieu, and Michael McLeod). The last of those names, McLeod, is the afore-mentioned team leader in scoring with six points; he is also one of the men facing sexual assault charges in connection with an 2018 incident involving Canadian World Juniors players. Orazbayev did say that Barys will keep its Russian players except for Kodola and Apalkov, and that group includes some well-known KHL veterans like Anton Burdasov, Viktor Antipin, and Stanislav Bocharov. Outside of those, however, we can expect to see some young Kazakh players getting a bit of a look in the big league.
What does it all mean? Well, the release of the foreign players sounds like the sort of cost-cutting that happens when the season has been given up for lost. The funding for Barys largely comes from the public purse in Kazakhstan, meaning that there is some pressure on the club not to waste it on high-priced imports who aren’t living up to their end of the bargain. So the disastrous 2024-25 season may give Barys a chance to try out some homegrown players who might otherwise not get a look. And hopefully, keeping a few Russian veteran players on hand will give the youngsters something of a stable support system.
At least, that no doubt is what the team’s fans and leadership will be hoping for. What is certain, however, is that Barys Astana need to follow these changes with some off-ice stability, whatever may happen with the on-ice results. The new era on the ice will begin on Saturday, and in the toughest possible fashion: a visit to league-leading Lokomotiv Yaroslavl. We will see what happens!
Patrick Conway is a writer based in Peterborough, Ontario. He previously covered Russian hockey at the Conway’s Russian Hockey blog, and he still keeps an eye on goings-on in that area.
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