The numbers tell a bit of a complicated story. Pavel Buchnevich finished the 2025-26 season with 20 goals and 48 points in 81 games, which is respectable production by most standards, but a meaningful step back from the player who posted 67 points in 63 games during the 2022-23 campaign and looked, for a season or two, like one of the more quietly dangerous wingers in the Western Conference. The Blues paid him accordingly, signing him to an eight-million-dollar cap hit through 2031.
Heading into the 2026-27 season, the question should not be whether Buchnevich can return to that level. It is whether St. Louis needs to accept that he probably cannot, and what that means for a franchise trying to build a contender around Robert Thomas, Jordan Kyrou, Dylan Holloway, and Jimmy Snuggerud.
To be fair, context matters here. The 2025-26 Blues were a difficult offensive environment from start to finish. This was not a team that generated chances consistently at even strength, and the structural breakdowns that plagued the Blues all season were not Buchnevich’s doing alone. His minus-10 rating is as much a byproduct of the systemic issues as it is individual performance. When the team around a secondary scorer is struggling to create and sustain pressure, that player’s counting stats are naturally going to suffer. His shot total dropped to 142, the lowest in a full season with the Blues, and while his shooting percentage held at 14.1 percent, the volume simply was not there. It wasn’t that he was unlucky, but seemed less involved offensively.
Again, context only goes so far. Buchnevich has now produced declining points-per-game numbers in three consecutive seasons. He sat at 1.06 in 2022-23, dropped to 0.79 in 2023-24, slid further to 0.75 in 2024-25, and landed at 0.59 this past season, and is now back to the same pace he produced in his final years in New York before the Blues acquired him. This is a major red flag and concerning trend line, and it deserves to be treated as one instead of one masked away entirely by team context.
Buchnevich, along with the rest of the team, will need to be ready to start the season from the moment the puck drops. The Russian forward was nearly invisible through the first 21 games of the 2025-26 campaign, managing just seven points while averaging over 18 minutes a night. The ice time was there, but the production was not. He found something resembling his better self through the middle two quarters of the season, combining for 31 points across 41 games. Had he managed that pace across all 81 games he played in, it would have put him around 62 points for and made this a much more comfortable conversation.
Then the fourth quarter arrived, and the bottom fell out. Ten points in 19 games, his average ice time dropping to under 17 minutes per night as the coaching staff began to quietly reduce his workload. Whether that late fade was due to fatigue, a deliberate deployment shift by Jim Montgomery, or something more structural in Buchnevich’s game is a question that will need to be addressed heading into next season.
Buchnevich turned 31 this summer and while that is not a sudden age cliff, but it does mark the beginning of the window when offensive production typically plateaus and then gradually begins to drop off. This is generally shows up for players whose games rely more on skill and positioning than raw physical dominance. At his peak with the Blues, he posted a 1.06 points-per-game pace in 2022-23, an 85-point pace the season before. This was the production the Blues believed they were locking up long-term. Looking back now, those two seasons now look more like the highly-productive outliers of his career, instead of the established baseline.
None of this should make Buchnevich a liability in the near future. He is still a technically skilled player with good hands, an accurate shot, and the ability to control puck possession in the offensive zone when he is engaged. There will be nights when he looks like the player the Blues thought they were paying for. But the expectation that he would grow into a consistent 65-to-70-point performer alongside Thomas and Kyrou has not materialized, and now it looks like it will not.
Looking ahead, Buchnevich seems like he’ll be a solid 50-to-60-point contributor, playing middle-six minutes. He might even have some moments that remind us of his best days, but it’s probably not going to be a consistent full-season performer. That’s still a valuable player, though, he’s just not an eight-million-dollar player in a league where cap space is the biggest challenge for teams.
For Steen, Buchnevich is one of the more complex and tricky roster questions he’ll face as he takes over as general manager this offseason. The contract isn’t easy to move without taking a tough hit, the player isn’t in a position where a buyout makes sense, and the production isn’t strong enough to just say the situation is fixed and move on. The Blues need to clearly and honestly figure out what Buchnevich is like at 30. Building a team around a false ceiling is exactly how teams waste years of resources and wonder why things don’t go as planned.