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  • The Minnesota Wild Have Already Blown Their Post-Parise/Suter Windfall

    Image courtesy of Isaiah J. Downing-USA Today Sports
    Tony Abbott

    By Tony Abbott -

    July 1, 2025. Minnesota Wild fans have mentally circled this day on the calendars in their heads for years. On that day, the bulk of the salary cap penalties for Zach Parise and Ryan Suter expire, freeing up a touch more than $13 million for Minnesota. What can a team that has Kirill Kaprizov, Joel Eriksson Ek, and Matt Boldy locked in for discount prices do with an extra $13 million to throw around?

    Any expectations fans are building are destined to disappoint. It'd be nice to see the Wild hit the market and make the kind of franchise-changing move that the Florida Panthers made in acquiring Matthew Tkachuk or the New York Rangers did in signing Artemi Panarin. It probably was never going to happen, though, even with CapFriendly projecting the Wild for $28.66 million of cap space (under a $92 million salary cap).

    The Wild would always need to give Kaprizov a raise, although his contract expires in 2026, and extend Brock Faber once his ELC wraps up in the summer of 2025. Those are just the biggest ticket items. Young centers Marco Rossi and Marat Khusnutdinov will hit RFA status just as that $13 million falls off the cap, as will top goalie prospect Jesper Wallstedt. Even with a (presumably) rising cap and the dead money expiring, those things will offset Minnesota's ability to throw some real dollars around.

    Let's make some conservative salary projections to illustrate this point. Say Faber takes a clone of Boldy's sweetheart deal, earning $7 million per year against the cap. As for Wallstedt, let's say he earns $3.5 million annually on his next deal, about $1 million less than Spencer Knight took with the Florida Panthers after 36 career games. Now we'll mark Rossi and Khusnutdinov's bridge deals clock at $2.5 and $1.5 million, respectively.

    That's probably the best-case scenario for these four upcoming contracts, and even then, they will come in at a $14.5 million price tag. Suddenly, the Wild must fill eight roster spots (Minnesota would have 15 of 23 accounted for) and $14 million to do it with. That's much more flexibility than they've had in the past few offseasons. Still, when you're earmarking a good chunk of that to Kaprizov going forward, it hurts Minnesota's ability to get any long-term impact help.

    So, this windfall the State of Hockey has built in its heads will be less a Scrooge McDuck pool and more of a Mitch Hedberg-esque above-ground pool of money. Where did that spending power go?

    Oh, no...

    Please, make it stop. We beg you.

    Fine, whatever, hopefully you got it out of your system, and we can look ahead to...

    We're not alarmed; we're just desperate for these to end. Please, Minnesota, we have a family.

    To recap: the summer the Wild are having $13 million of dead money disappear from the salary cap completely, they're spending money on the following extensions from the last 12 months:

    Mats Zuccarello (age-38 season): $4.125M
    Marcus Foligno (34): $4M
    Ryan Hartman (31): $4M
    Freddy Gaudreau (32): $2.1M
    Zach Bogosian (35): $1.25M
    Total: $15.475M

    someone who is good at the salary cap please help me budget this. my team is dying

    That's where the ability to get the next Panarin or Tkachuk is. Tied up in five extensions to players in their 30s. The complaint about these extensions is less that any one individual move is objectionable (though Gaudreau and Bogosian's deals probably are) but that they're especially bad in the aggregate. A lot of Minnesota's money is tied up in aging, declining assets and with it, the possibility of being able to add elite talent to the roster.

    It's not a one-to-one comparable to Parise and Suter's dead cap hits, of course. The Wild are filling five roster spots with these players instead of zero from the buyouts. These five players have given Minnesota a combined 7.5 Standings Points Above Replacement this season, much more than the 0.0 Parise and Suter's $14.7 million are contributing to the team.

    If that number starts dropping towards 0.0 in two years, and Father Time has a way of making that happen, the effect will be the same: A big percentage of the salary cap goes towards things that aren't helping the team win. That's not to mention the $1.667 remnants of the Parise/Suter cap hits that will be sticking around over the life of these extensions.

    If we add that dead cap hit to the total cost of the extensions, this is the breakdown, year-by-year, starting in 2025-26:

    2025-26: $17.142M
    2026-27: $11.767M (Zuccarello, Bogosian off the books)
    2027-28: $7.767M (Hartman off the books)
    2028-29: $1.667M (Foligno, Gaudreau off the books)

    It's an incredible amount of money tied up in five (mostly) non-elite players at various points in their 30s and two buyouts. Sure, you can point out that things finally get manageable in 2027-28. But counterpoint: Who cares?

    2025-26 and 2026-27 are the years that Minnesota fans should have been able to expect for their Stanley Cup window. 2025-26 has the last season of Kaprizov in his prime (he'll be 28) and making a bargain-basement $9 million against the cap. Joel Eriksson Ek (ages 28-29) will be on the right side of 30 in both those seasons. Boldy (24-25), Rossi (23-24), Khusnutdinov (23-24), and Faber (23-24) will also be entering their primes, with Wallstedt (23-24) positioning himself as Minnesota's answer to Jake Oettinger. It'll be the last years of Jared Spurgeon's (37-38) deal, and Jonas Brodin (32-33) will also be running out of productive years.

    Plus, the Wild should expect a combination of Danila Yurov, Liam Öhgren, Riley Heidt, and Carson Lambos to emerge over the next two seasons. There should be some real (and cheap!) NHL talent in the 2025-26 and 2026-27 seasons.

    That's the Cup window, the time when the team should be ready to take a big swing. Teams that are ready to take the leap into Stanley Cup contention do this all the time. The Chicago Blackhawks and Boston Bruins signed Marian Hossa and Zdeno Chara, respectively, to free-agent deals in the late 2000s that spurred their runs to Cup glory. Or think of the Los Angeles Kings acquiring Jeff Carter and Mike Richards, the Vegas Golden Knights importing Mark Stone and Jack Eichel, or the St. Louis Blues snagging Ryan O'Reilly. You build a team up, then supplement them with elite talent when the time is right.

    Bill Guerin should know this, as he was in the front office of the mid-2010s Pittsburgh Penguins team that swung big for Phil Kessel and won two Cups in large part because of the move. But how do the Wild land their Kessel now?

    Instead of being able to take a big swing, the Wild has put themselves in a position where they've parlayed their golden opportunity into praying that Zuccarello remains a point-per-game player at 38. They're hoping that injuries and hard miles won't continue to wear Foligno down or that Hartman can either remain a top-six caliber player or provide $4 million of value in a checking role. They're also gambling on Gaudreau and Bogosian having productive years left when the rest of the roster is ready to contend.

    The Wild might be able to overcome this, of course. They have high-end talent in Kaprizov, Boldy, and Faber. Their defensive foundation will be strong as long as Spurgeon, Brodin, and Eriksson Ek are healthy. Getting another star or two from Yurov, Rossi, Khusnutdinov, Öhgren, Heidt, or their 2024 draft pick will go a long way to helping. Heck, if Wallstedt is everything prospect gurus think he can be, an elite No. 1 goalie papers over many flaws.

    If they can get a Stanley Cup out of this group, no one's going to care about these extensions. Flags fly forever. But if this group misses their window coming out of the Parise/Suter Dead Cap Era, then never gets close again? That's a different story, one which will lead to fans second-guessing for years why they willingly put themselves into a second, de facto Dead Cap Era.

    By Tony Abbott  

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    TheGoosesAreLooses
    On 3/12/2024 at 2:38 PM, Protec said:

    I would more easily associate "windfall" with teams like Vegas, NY, or Chicago. 

    I would consider MN more like escaping captivity. 

    Foligno, Hartman, and Zuccarello have performed just as we expected. Nobody else was there to displace them.

    Fred and NoJo are both entitled to a bounceback year for me at least. Each guy looked the part when they got signed. Okay with me. After next season, that's gonna have to be re-evaluated.

    Guerin needed to be making small gains and keeping flexibility for when the penalties end. I don't think he's painted himself into a corner on that.

    I agree with your point about Foligno Hartman and Zucc, they have played up to their contracts so far. The going concern for me is the length of Foligno's contract, the others should age not terribly.

    Fred and Nojo on the other hand, I disagree. Looking at their careers, both played well above average when we signed them and were likely to revert to the mean and did. I think it was ill advised to lock them in based on record years, especially when they are over 30. Thankfully the cap hit on both contracts is fairly easy to stomach.

    The biggest issue I see coming, is if we have an influx of prospects all ready at the same time. The clauses in these contracts make for a logjam. I'm not sure after a down year if anyone is willing to take on Freddy Evason with 4 years left. Guerin did well to make some space at the deadline, regardless of whether or not I agree the right players left. I think he will continue to force the moves he needs to get the right players on the ice and I'll applaud him for it. Even if it means giving up draft picks to send dead cat contracts elsewhere.

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    mnfaninnc
    10 hours ago, punch_cut said:

    They protected 3 D in 7/3/1 configuration. Spurg, brodin, dumba were the right people protected. 

    This is not the point. The point is that almost all GMs favor certain types of players. Going into the Expansion Draft, Guerin should have known what type of players Ron Francis was after. Soucy fit the bill perfectly, and I think that this is who Guerin thought Francis would take. 

    Spurgeon and Brodin had to be on the list, and Suter, had he not been bought out would have had to also. The point is that knowing who the other guy values and doesn't value is how you manipulate the exposure. 

    Take back in 2017 before Spurgeon had his NMC. His cap number was north of $5m and he was a dynamic player, though undersized. Is that the type of player that McPhee values? Could McPhee have chosen him and immediately flipped him? Maybe, but most other teams were bleeding cap space that year. 

    So, this is what Fletcher should have known, McPhee's tendencies. He had a track record in Washington so you knew what kind of players he valued. They're talking about expansion again. Knowing your GM opponent helps you to know who they're likely to take, and then you can determine who you can give up. It's not so much about who you as a GM value, it's about who the other GM values.

    Had we exposed Spurgeon in 2017, most of the fanbase would have gasped. But, knowing that McPhee liked the larger bodies, you could have probably snuck Spurgeon through the process because you knew McPhee would look at him and say "too small." Staal was a little more iffy. His age didn't bode well for McPhee, but McPhee did have a long history watching him in Carolina. He knew the player Staal was, and he knew how brutal Staal could play when they weren't in contention. That one was about 50/50. I really think that McPhee would have bypassed Staal and tried for someone younger and I would have risked it.

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    mnfaninnc
    6 minutes ago, TheGoosesAreLooses said:

    The biggest issue I see coming, is if we have an influx of prospects all ready at the same time. The clauses in these contracts make for a logjam.

    You say logjam and that is accurate, I say competition and that is also accurate. The top of the crop is who makes the roster. Human nature says that if the position is up for grabs, the most competitive players will have monster offseasons to grab that spot. 

    Let's take Adam Beckman for instance. He finally got into a couple of games. I thought he held his own, looked more comfortable on defense, but was not large enough to compete along the boards where he has to dig pucks out. I saw him once again struggle with the speed change in the N as he tripped over himself a few times. And, instead of bodychecking the defender into the boards, he played stick whirling trying to steal and initiated 0 contact. 

    What Beckman needs is 10 lbs. of lower body strength and 10 lbs. of upper body strength this summer and that is a tall task. Without using PEDs, it's probably not doable. But, if he wants that position, he has procrastinated long enough in doing this and he needs that monster offseason where he really does nothing other than lift and skate. He needs edge work and he needs acceleration. The strength will help a lot, but it's got to translate. 

    There are many other prospects in the same boat, and especially when Beckman or others look around, they see their competition. What they don't see is how Ohgren is training (who had a really good week) and how Dino and Yurov are training. The guys he sees aren't bulking up much, so he thinks he's fine. He's not, and he needs to know he's not.

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    TheGoosesAreLooses
    6 minutes ago, mnfaninnc said:

    You say logjam and that is accurate, I say competition and that is also accurate. The top of the crop is who makes the roster. Human nature says that if the position is up for grabs, the most competitive players will have monster offseasons to grab that spot. 

    Let's take Adam Beckman for instance. He finally got into a couple of games. I thought he held his own, looked more comfortable on defense, but was not large enough to compete along the boards where he has to dig pucks out. I saw him once again struggle with the speed change in the N as he tripped over himself a few times. And, instead of bodychecking the defender into the boards, he played stick whirling trying to steal and initiated 0 contact. 

    What Beckman needs is 10 lbs. of lower body strength and 10 lbs. of upper body strength this summer and that is a tall task. Without using PEDs, it's probably not doable. But, if he wants that position, he has procrastinated long enough in doing this and he needs that monster offseason where he really does nothing other than lift and skate. He needs edge work and he needs acceleration. The strength will help a lot, but it's got to translate. 

    There are many other prospects in the same boat, and especially when Beckman or others look around, they see their competition. What they don't see is how Ohgren is training (who had a really good week) and how Dino and Yurov are training. The guys he sees aren't bulking up much, so he thinks he's fine. He's not, and he needs to know he's not.

    I agree MN fan. Competition is a good thing. What isn't a good thing is when we can't drop a Freddy or Nojo out of the lineup for that rookie player who has earned their spot due to a NMC. That's more what i was speaking to when i said a logjam. 

    Becky didn't have a bad cup of coffee up here but it wasn't spectacular or enough to keep him on the roster. More work is needed but I think he still has the potential to be a mainstay in this league if he buckles down.

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    mnfaninnc
    Just now, TheGoosesAreLooses said:

    What isn't a good thing is when we can't drop a Freddy or Nojo out of the lineup for that rookie player who has earned their spot due to a NMC. That's more what i was speaking to when i said a logjam. 

    Both players have NTCs and can be sent to Iowa. There is no lost opportunity, but the young guy has to clearly beat him out of a roster spot.

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    Protec

    I'd agree that a 2M guy sitting in the press box or put on waivers is okay.

    To me, Guerin has the interchangable-parts bases covered and the young bucks bases covered. The ability to draw from either pool is there. The flexibility to sit them or be prepared for injuries is there.

    Do the Wild have a big, fast, highly skilled team. Not overall, but they can beat some good teams when they play right. The Wild do have some elite weapons and capable goaltending. At the expense of being repetitive, the Wild are pretty decent given the penalties.

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    Tony Abbott
    23 hours ago, mnfaninnc said:

    Wait just a moment. The extensions start next season while we are still under the heavy lifting of the buyouts. If we can fit that into next year's cap, why can't we fit that into subsequent years? That argument makes no sense.

    They can fit this money in, no problem, that's not the point. The point is keeping them going forward loses them flexibility because they had a chance have ~$12-15 million extra of clear cap once Parise/Suter buyouts fall off. It will technically be raises to Kaprizov/Faber/Rossi/Khusnutdinov/Wallstedt that eats up the Parise/Suter money, but without these multi-year extensions, the Wild would still have some clear cap space to make a big addition.

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    Tony Abbott
    4 hours ago, mnfaninnc said:

    This is not the point. The point is that almost all GMs favor certain types of players. Going into the Expansion Draft, Guerin should have known what type of players Ron Francis was after. Soucy fit the bill perfectly, and I think that this is who Guerin thought Francis would take. 

    Spurgeon and Brodin had to be on the list, and Suter, had he not been bought out would have had to also. The point is that knowing who the other guy values and doesn't value is how you manipulate the exposure. 

    Take back in 2017 before Spurgeon had his NMC. His cap number was north of $5m and he was a dynamic player, though undersized. Is that the type of player that McPhee values? Could McPhee have chosen him and immediately flipped him? Maybe, but most other teams were bleeding cap space that year. 

    So, this is what Fletcher should have known, McPhee's tendencies. He had a track record in Washington so you knew what kind of players he valued. They're talking about expansion again. Knowing your GM opponent helps you to know who they're likely to take, and then you can determine who you can give up. It's not so much about who you as a GM value, it's about who the other GM values.

    Had we exposed Spurgeon in 2017, most of the fanbase would have gasped. But, knowing that McPhee liked the larger bodies, you could have probably snuck Spurgeon through the process because you knew McPhee would look at him and say "too small." Staal was a little more iffy. His age didn't bode well for McPhee, but McPhee did have a long history watching him in Carolina. He knew the player Staal was, and he knew how brutal Staal could play when they weren't in contention. That one was about 50/50. I really think that McPhee would have bypassed Staal and tried for someone younger and I would have risked it.

    You are crazy if you think Vegas wouldn't have taken Spurgeon and laughed in the Wild's faces over it. He was sixth in WAR among defensemen over the previous three years, easily the best player that would've been available to them. You act like they didn't get Jonathan Marchessault. 

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    B1GKappa97

    The Wild currently have $36.2M in cap space for the '25-'26 season with 10/23 players under contract.

    Players they will likely add to the books:

    Forwards: Khusnutdinov ($2M), Rossi ($3M), Shaw ($1M), Ohgren ($1M), 2 4th line scrubs ($2M), Yurov ($1M)

    Defensemen: Middleton ($4M), Faber ($8.5M), Chisholm ($2.5M), Hunt ($1M)

    Goalies: Wallstedt ($2.5M)

    That's $28.5M of the extra cap taken up by these estimates. That leaves them $7.7M in cap space still, which ought to be enough for them to find a top-6 forward. Whether in UFA or at the TDL. 

    I think they'll be okay..

    Edited by B1GKappa97
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    mnfaninnc
    21 hours ago, Tony Abbott said:

    They can fit this money in, no problem, that's not the point. The point is keeping them going forward loses them flexibility because they had a chance have ~$12-15 million extra of clear cap once Parise/Suter buyouts fall off. It will technically be raises to Kaprizov/Faber/Rossi/Khusnutdinov/Wallstedt that eats up the Parise/Suter money, but without these multi-year extensions, the Wild would still have some clear cap space to make a big addition.

    I can buy that logic, I didn't necessarily read that into the article, though. To be fair, I'm dealing with a cold that is really snotty and anything mind related feels like I'm swimming through slime! 

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    mnfaninnc
    21 hours ago, Tony Abbott said:

    You are crazy if you think Vegas wouldn't have taken Spurgeon and laughed in the Wild's faces over it. He was sixth in WAR among defensemen over the previous three years, easily the best player that would've been available to them. You act like they didn't get Jonathan Marchessault. 

    Wasn't taking Marchessault some kind of a deal with FL? They fleeced a lot of teams. No, I don't believe they would have taken Spurgeon, as with a lot of other GMs who simply think he is too small. Even with the WAR numbers, some players GMs just don't like. 

    But, for argument's sake let's just say that they did take him. While he was an important part of our team, the loss would have taken out $5+m in cap, and we had some cap difficulty. You were going to lose a good player. Instead, we chose to lose 2 good, young, financially bargained players instead of one good one. We would have had an extra $3m to spend with one less roster spot to fill. 

     

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    mnfaninnc
    20 hours ago, B1GKappa97 said:

    Faber ($8.5M)

    I think this is a little high, probably not for his value, but what Guerin will pay. There's always the option of bridging him and then giving him his Brinks truck contract.

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