Just a year ago, the Minnesota Wild had one of the cleanest salary cap pictures in the NHL. Despite having two years of Zach Parise and Ryan Suter‘s dead money counting against them, Dom Luszczyszyn ranked the Wild as the sixth-most efficient spenders in the NHL. A quick look at their contracts made it obvious why.
Their three best players, Matt Boldy, Joel Eriksson Ek, and Kirill Kaprizov, were their three best contracts, and it wasn’t close. Beyond that, almost everyone was either on a contract at a decent value, short-term, or both. When your worst contract is a one-year, $1 million pact with Patrick Maroon, that’s an excellent spot to be in.
There’s one fewer year of cap hell from the Parise/Suter buyouts. Still, the Wild have fallen precipitously in Luszczyszyn’s rankings. This year, the contracts on the books earned a collective grade of a C, ranking 19th overall in the NHL. They have tumbled 13 places, the biggest year-to-year drop of any team in the league.
Remember how Maroon was the worst contract on the team last year? Just 12 months later, there are four contracts on Minnesota’s books that earn a lower grade. A down year for Freddy Gaudreau bumps his deal from a B-minus to a C-minus. Yakov Trenin, the Wild’s biggest free agent this offseason, got a deal that is worth about half as much as his projected value. That deal gets a D-plus grade. Then Marcus Foligno and Jake Middleton‘s new extensions earned solid D and D-minus grades, respectively.
It won’t surprise anyone who’s been reading Hockey Wilderness for the past year or so. Still, seeing the numbers like that should serve as a final slap of reality to anyone who needs it. Bill Guerin just completed a speedrun of blowing up his cap picture.
It sounds counterintuitive, but slapping on those buyout handcuffs seemed to be the best thing for Guerin. Bill Guerin squeezed value out of cheap deals with Ryan Hartman, Foligno, and Gaudreau with aplomb. Moving a soon-to-be $7.8 million winger in Fiala and getting a top-pairing defenseman on an ELC in Brock Faber was a masterstroke. Minnesota’s cap crisis undoubtedly influenced discounts on Boldy and Eriksson Ek.
Limitations can create great, innovative moves. Now that we see Guerin operate a salary cap without handicaps — remember, many of these deals extend well past the worst of the Parise/Suter buyout penalties fall off — we have more to point to the idea that these…
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