By Tony Abbott -
The universal view of the Zach Parise and Ryan Suter buyouts is that they were an anchor around the neck of the Minnesota Wild. That's absolutely true, you can't argue that Minnesota's upside wasn't capped by having $15 million or so in dead money these last two years. But even downsides can have upsides, and for Bill Guerin, the upside of having no money to play with is that it's pretty hard to make mistakes.
Sure, you don't get to have those splashy summer headlines from signing free agents, but those tend to curdle quickly. Look at the Seattle Kraken, who threw center Chandler Stephenson $44 million last summer out of desperation for depth down the middle. Or pop some popcorn and get ready for Year 2 of the Nashville Predators weighing down their team with big deals for aging Steven Stamkos, Jonathan Marchessault, and Brady Skjei.
By default, Guerin avoided those landmines. That's not to discredit what he accomplished during the worst of the Wild buyouts. He had little margin for error in those four seasons, and he piloted his team to the playoffs in three out of four years. Regardless of whether or not you think that's what the play should have been, it's very impressive work.
Now the field has opened to Guerin, with all of the privileges and risks that will entail. And as efficient as Guerin has been over these last four years, it's hard not to be a bit nervous about this. We saw him step on one of those landmines by giving Yakov Trenin a four-year, $3.5 million AAV contract last summer, even with the team cap-strapped. There's also the fact that the Vancouver Canucks apparently saved Guerin from giving Brock Boeser a risky, lucrative, long-term deal.
That's a concern for a team that's already starting to see a few cracks in its spending. The Wild moved up from 19th to 11th in the NHL in contract efficiency, per Dom Luszczyszyn's annual ranking at The Athletic. It's encouraging, but it doesn't tell the whole story. A significant amount of heavy lifting was accomplished by $15 million of dead cap being reduced to less than $2 million, as well as Matt Boldy's value skyrocketing when weighed against his $7 million price tag.
Last season, the Wild had just seven contracts that Luszczyszyn projected to produce negative value. Now that number is up to nine, and the average length of those contracts extends through the next three years (two years, if you exclude Brock Faber's eight-year extension that kicked in last month). That includes every defenseman except for Jake Middleton.
The list of likely-negative-value deals also includes two of Guerin's extensions from Fall 2023 (Ryan Hartman and Marcus Foligno), last summer's "splash" signing (Trenin), and this summer's free agent of note (Nico Sturm).
No team is immune to bad contracts, and the good teams rely on having some good or even great deals to cancel out the bad. The Wild are in the positive, overall. However, that's assuming Kirill Kaprizov is making $9 million against the cap. Next fall, that will become a deal much closer to his value. Heck, he might even be the highest-paid player in the league. There goes a $5 million cushion to absorb a bad hit or two.
The salary cap's rise also means that the Wild are receiving their cap relief at a time when player prices are set to skyrocket. That might help the longer-term negative-value contracts, such as Faber (for now), Brodin, Foligno, and Trenin, age a bit more gracefully. Still, it presents a new set of problems. We're already seeing the conflict between the Wild's price points and the market in their stalemate with Marco Rossi.
Getting $13 million of flexibility would have gone a long way if the cap had still been flat, as it has been for the last four years. Instead, the Wild are giving about half of that to Kaprizov in a year, and $8 million isn't going to go terribly far going forward. Heck, they might spend a bunch of it on Rossi.
And if not Rossi, there's the next free agent opportunity, especially since the Wild are hoping to eventually deliver on "Christmas Morning."
How can Guerin stay smart, flexible, and efficient going forward? A big part of that puzzle is in place, at least for the next couple of seasons. Entry Level Contracts for Zeev Buium and Danila Yurov mean that the Wild will have key contributors making very little money for the next two years. David Jiříček is in the final year of his ELC next year, and doesn't figure to make a ton of money on his next deal, unless things go really well.
But that's only part of the formula, and that's only temporary. Guerin is going to have to navigate the seas of free agency while having a full arsenal of cap space without taking on too much water from bad deals. Making the best of a limited situation is a skill, but now we'll have to see how Guerin's cap management translates to a new environment.
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