Report: Kirill Kaprizov eligible to sign and burn first year, cap recapture amended

With the NHL and NHLPA having reached a tentative agreement on the Return to Play Plan and an extension of the collective bargaining agreement on Monday, a couple of details that could significantly impact the Minnesota Wild were also uncovered Monday night.

First, it was confirmed that Kirill Kaprizov, along with other European players such as Ilya Sorokin and Alexander Romanov, will not be eligible to play in the 24-team postseason tournament, assuming it actually takes place. However, there was a compromise made by the NHL and NHLPA that allows those players to sign entry-level contracts starting in 2019-20, burning the first year of their deals while being ineligible to play.

This is significant because it now gives the Wild and Kaprizov a few options on how to move forward. The first option is to sign Kaprizov to his two-year entry-level contract now and burn the first year of it this summer. The second option — and it’s still unclear if this is possible — is to sign Kaprizov to his two-year entry level contract starting in 2020-21 and then loan him to play for a team in Europe (potentially the SHL or Liiga).

Lastly, of course, is the possibility that Kaprizov could decide to re-sign in the KHL for another year. If this happens, his KHL team, CSKA Moscow, has made it clear that they will not comply with a loan, meaning that Kaprizov would spend the full season over in Russia.

Either way, both the Wild and Kaprizov will have some thinking to do over the next few days as they try to decide on how to resolve this seemingly never-ending debacle.

The other news coming out of the tentative CBA agreement pertaining to the Wild is that the potential cap recapture penalties have been amended — specifically that the potential salary cap charge can no longer be greater than a contract’s average annual value ($7.538 million in the case of Zach Parise and Ryan Suter), although that charge would continue until the overage is fully paid off.

This could be potentially very significant news for the Wild. As we talked about earlier this season, if one or both of Zach Parise and Ryan Suter were to retire or be traded before the conclusion of their contracts, the cap recapture penalties that Minnesota would’ve been saddled with could’ve been absolutely devastating.

Now, while the cap charge will still be at $7.538 million if either of Parise or Suter can’t play out their contracts, the Wild are now able to rest a little bit easier knowing that if something unfortunate were to happen, it would not doom their salary cap situation as it once seemed like it could.