Wild Report Cards 2023-24: Kirill Kaprizov – The Hockey Writers – Minnesota Wild

It’s time for the Minnesota Wild’s final player report card, which means their star, Kirill Kaprizov, is up for critique. While the team may have had a disappointing end to the season due to missing out on the postseason, Kaprizov overcame some obstacles. At the beginning of the season, he struggled to recover fully from an injury he had faced at the end of the season. 

Once he was back to normal, he was hit with another injury that caused him to miss seven games. However, this time around, he didn’t take long to recover and was tallying points almost immediately. In this article, we’ll look at a rough part of his game and a strong part of his game and come up with an overall grade for his season. We’ll start with his high giveaways and move on from there. 

Kaprizov Struggles With Turnovers

When a player handles the puck as much as a player like Kaprizov, he will automatically have more turnovers. He carries the puck more often, and that comes with more risk. However, he had 73 turnovers in 75 games played, which is too high. Of course, other high scorers like Connor McDavid and Nathan MacKinnon have high giveaways, but Kaprizov can be better. 

He’s a great puck handler, and some turnovers were just the puck slipping off his stick because he was trying to do too much. It’s good he wants to take risks, but losing the puck to the opposing team should be limited as much as possible. Clearly, he earns a little slack because, at times, he was the only player truly trying, but some of his turnovers led to goals against, and their team struggled to make any comebacks. 

This next season, the Wild need Kaprizov to continue taking risks and use his strong puck-handling skills but avoid the opposing players. If he can duck and dodge a little more often and protect the puck, he’ll have fewer turnovers. He’s capable of doing this; he just needs to be more careful and watch his passes, especially when he’s on the ice with his best buddy, Mats Zuccarello. 

Kaprizov and Zuccarello are often in their own little world when they’re on the ice together, to the point they only pass to each other, which also caused passes that were predicted by the other team. Hopefully, they can fix this if they’re paired together this coming season, and Kaprizov will have fewer turnovers. 

Kaprizov Continues Scoring Power

Whenever…