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Injuries expose Wild’s salary cap issues early

john shipley, pioneer press
·4 min read

Anyone who follows the Minnesota Wild knew the team would be hamstrung by a lack of salary cap space this season. Most, however, probably didn’t see it happening so soon.

Starting last offseason, general manager Bill Guerin and the Wild started really paying for their decision to buy out the contracts of Zach Parise and Ryan Suter after the 2020-21 season — charged $14.7 million of dead space on this year’s $83.5 million salary cap.

As a result, the Wild started the season with little room for trouble, and they’ve been handed plenty of trouble early with injuries to their best defenseman, Jared Spurgeon, second-leading goal scorer Matt Boldy and veteran blue liner Alex Goligoski.

And while it’s being handled fairly well — the Wild are 2-2-1 headed into Tuesday night’s game against Edmonton at Xcel Energy Center — there is little question those buyouts are being felt.

“It’s part of the game,” Guerin said Sunday. “And for a team in our situation, yeah, It can make it very difficult.”

It’s important to remember that buying out Parise and Suter was part of a larger effort to rebuild the team Guerin inherited when he was hired in August 2019. Most of the players who were here when Guerin arrived were moved in one way or another, including Mikko Koivu, Eric Staal, Jordan Greenway, Kevin Fiala, Jason Zucker, Victor Rask, Ryan Donato and Devan Dubnyk.

“It’s just the reality. This was broken,” Guerin said, “and we couldn’t just keep rolling out the same guys and expect different results.”

The difference, of course, between Parise and Suter and any of those other players is the Wild are still paying, dearly, for buying out the final four seasons of their identical, 13-year, $98 million contracts.

The Wild needed an emergency loan to call forward Sammy Walker up from Iowa because his $855,000 NHL salary was bigger than the $818,000 cap space they started the season with. And while Goligoski is on long-term injured reserve, giving the Wild the equivalent of his $2 million salary in cap relief, the Wild aren’t using it because it would temporarily halt the “accrual” of cap space the Wild can use later this season.

When asked before a 7-3 loss to Los Angeles on Oct. 19 if he thought the team would call up another blue liner, head coach Dean Evason said, “Beats the snot out of me” before adding, “It’s probably going to be like this. Every team’s gone through it.”

Minnesota is strong at its core after returning most of the roster that helped the Wild finish third in the Central Division with 103 points last season, and Guerin is on record saying he believes the team can compete for its first Stanley Cup. But injuries already are taking a toll, especially on a defense playing without Matt Dumba for the first time in 10 years.

The only real addition the team made was Pat Maroon, acquired from Tampa Bay for a seventh-round pick — a canny addition that has improved the team’s line depth. But otherwise the Wild extended the contracts of core players such as Boldy (January), goaltender Filip Gustavsson (July), and forwards Mats Zuccarello, Ryan Hartman and Marcus Foligno (September).

Wild couldn’t afford to extend the contract of Dumba, playing big minutes in Arizona on a one-year $3.9 million contract, and it’s hard not to believe he wouldn’t be helping a team that had trouble getting out of its own end in Saturday night’s 5-4 overtime loss to Columbus.

The Wild will be charged $14.7 in dead space next season, as well, but should have the ability to add free-agent additions if they choose to next summer.

But for all the talent on the Wild’s roster this season — from top-line wing Kirill Kaprizov to elite blue liners Spurgeon and Jonas Brodin — the Wild are proving vulnerable to injuries early. And virtually no NHL team plays 82 regular-season games without injuries to key players.

“We’ll be in a much better spot if we stay healthy — more healthy than other teams,” Guerin said.

Briefly

The Wild reassigned Walker to Iowa on Sunday and replace him on the roster with Vinni Lettieri. A seventh-round pick in the 2017 amateur draft, Walker was scoreless with zero shots on goal in two NHL games. Lettieri, a former Gopher with 83 NHL games under his belt, has a goal and two assists at Iowa.

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