A player who keeps showing up in the rumour mill is that of St. Louis Blues winger Pavel Buchnevich.
And the reason is that there’s an active belief that the Blues aren’t going to want to pay Buchnevich when his $5.8-million contract is up at the end of the 2024-25 season.
The Edmonton Oilers are known to be actively scouting the 28-year-old on pace for 33 goals and 69 points, and he would be an excellent fit in the team’s top six. He has a good 6’1, 196 lb. frame, can play on both special teams, and eats up players in the defensive zone.
For Buchnevich, the asking price has varied from two first-round picks “or something like it,” to something similar to what the Calgary Flames got for Elias Lindholm: a first-round pick, a top-nine winger, and a good prospect.
If that’s the asking price, there’s no denying that the Oilers should be all in. With assets like their own first-round pick, a winger in Warren Foegele carries a $2.75-million cap hit, and a number of mid-level prospects, a potential deal between these two teams would make sense.
And on Wednesday’s edition of Daily Faceoff Live, Frank Seravalli talked about why
To me, one team that really stands out is Edmonton, and we’ve talked about the idea of Jake Guentzel, pending unrestricted free agent, very unlikely to be able to re-sign him. Is Buchnvich just not another version of Guentzel? A different player, but when you talk about filling out your top-six, Ken Holland has shown a preference to paying guys, paying for guys that have term.
It’s going to be tough to squeeze him in this year and next year as well with the salary cap increase being chewed up by Connor Brown, but make decisions elsewhere in your lineup. If you need to move out Warren Foegele, if you need to move out Brett Kulak or whatever it might be, there has to be some way to make this work if you really see this as a fit for this year and next. You can always go back and re-jig your salary cap when you get to the summer.
But just to make it through this year, if you’re talking about a difference maker and an impact player, we saw the impact Barbashev had going to Vegas had at the deadline last year, Buchnevich is plus-plus of that.
With the Blues looking to re-tool, rather than rebuild, and the fact that salary cap implications would be the foremost thing complicating this kind of a deal. The Oilers wouldn’t be able to fit Buchnevich’s full cap hit under the books, and unless there was salary retention, Edmonton would likely have to both off boh Foegele and Kulak to make a deal with the Blues work.
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