Barys is on sale! Where will the KHL’s most expensive goaltender end up?

Barys is on sale! Where will the KHL’s most expensive goaltender end up?

Pavel Panyshev November 29, 2023, 13:00 Moscow time Audio version: Your browser does not support the audio element.

Eddie Pasquale can help CSKA a lot, but Eastern Conference clubs are also competing for him.

As soon as the news of Barys’ top scorer Riley Barber being traded to Ak Bars died down, more news came from Kazakhstan. According to our information, the Astana club, which is failing this season, will soon make an exchange with the top Canadian goalkeeper for the KHL Eddie Pascual. Galym Mambetaliev’s team obviously won’t make the playoffs, so he is starting to get rid of his main assets. This is done to alleviate payroll and get some dividends for the best hockey players; Otherwise, at the end of the regular season people will leave with nothing.

How Barys bought before the season

This is what we bought! Barys launched a series of transfers. How will this change the Astana club?

Pasquale is the most expensive goalkeeper in the Continental League. His salary is 65 million rubles per season. Very respectable, but well deserved. In the 2020/2021 season, Eddie was recognized as the best goaltender in the KHL and is generally an iconic and well-known figure in our league.

Recall that the American began his career in the KHL at Barys, after which he played for Lokomotiv for two seasons and then moved to Metallurg. Eddie always kept the bar high: yes, there were not very successful periods, but the experience and skill of those people never disappear. Pasquale is precisely the goalkeeper with whom you can reach the playoffs and fight for the highest positions. In fact, that’s why the big guys pay attention to it.

In Barys, with the club’s current laxity and weak defensive play, no goalkeeper can be envied: one person cannot do the work of both defenders and forwards, who do not want to help again. “Pasquale looks good, he is reaching his level. A man of character,” said head coach Barys Mambetaliev.

Eddie Pasquale in the game

Photo: Ilnar Tukhbatov, photo.khl.ru

Where could Pasquale end up in the near future? We learned that two Eastern Conference clubs are actively interested in the Canadian: Avangard and Metallurg. Omsk won the Gagarin Cup with a foreigner in goal (Czech Grubets), and reaching the playoffs with Mishurov, Proskuryakov and Khomchenko, to put it mildly, is risky. But let’s not forget that the “hawks”, having managed to get rid of Shulak, are also looking for a foreign player to replace the second center forward. It is important that in Avangard Pasquale has a friend in Reed Boucher.

I wouldn’t mind returning the Canadian to my ranks at Metallurg. Andrei Razin’s team has already won 11 in a row, but in key matches of the Gagarin Cup Zagidulin, Nabokov and Sudnitsin can “float”. Eddie knows the club and the situation in Magnitogorsk very well, so there will definitely not be a long adaptation. They wanted to keep Pasquale at Metallurg in the off-season, but then the hockey player chose the option with Barys.

All about transfers to the KHL

The KHL is full of transfers! “Ak Bars” has an excellent treatment, “Avangard” returned the captain to the “Admiral”

However, CSKA would be the one that would help Pasquale the most in the current situation. The post-championship season for the army team turns out to be difficult, Ivan Fedotov, after returning from the army, will not reach his optimal shape (and this is logical, because the man missed the entire season), youngsters Gamzin and Skotnikov are gaining experience, Sharychenkov is a clear backup. Everyone remembers very well how the Swede Adam Reideborn won the Gagarin Cup with CSKA, which for certain reasons the military team could not retain. So now it’s definitely worth talking to Barys and trying to recruit Eddie into your ranks. In addition, CSKA already has a Canadian defender, Williams, recently transferred from Admiral. Well, Dietz, who speaks excellent Russian and has a Kazakh passport, was also born in Canada.

Let’s see how this transfer story ends. But there are already enough high-profile transfers to the KHL and we still have a transfer deadline ahead of us.