Better luck next year: The salary cap is still eating the Minnesota Wild
Those buyouts are still a problem.
Welcome back to Better Luck Next Year, a series that will focus on each team as they get eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. What went wrong, why it went wrong, what (if anything) went right, and what is next. We continue today with the next team to be officially eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention: The Minnesota Wild.
The Minnesota Wild’s problem has been a simple one over the past couple of seasons. While the rest of the league was working with an $83.5 million salary cap, they were pretty much stuck with a $68.8 million salary cap as a result of the buyouts for Zach Parise and Ryan Suter from a couple of years ago.
Those matching buyouts result in a $7.3 million dead cap number for each player through the end of the 2024-25 season.
I get why the Wild did it.
Parise and Suter’s contracts were pretty much the definition of a sunk cost and they were not getting any sort of positive value out of them. They were going to be stuck paying that money anyway and not getting the appropriate value for it. So it made some sense to just rip the band-aid off, take the hit and deal with the salary cap complications for a couple of years.
The downside to that is that it has really robbed them of any flexibility to adding players from outside of the organization and working to improve their depth. It also cost them a top-line scorer in Kevin Fiala (though it might have been worth it in the long-run … more on that in a bit). They have simply been stuck in a salary cap quagmire and still have one more year of it ahead.
They were able to work through it a year ago thanks in part to some big years from their top stars offensively, and most importantly, some exceptional goaltending including a breakout year from Filip Gustavsson. The Wild finished the 2022-23 season second in the NHL in 5-on-5 save percentage and third in all-situations save percentage. That level of goaltending is not only going to give any team a chance to win, it is going to mask an awful lot of flaws.
They were not as fortunate this season, and it resulted in a bitterly disappointing season that saw Wild miss the playoffs for just the second time in 12 years.
Let’s talk about it.
Everything that went wrong
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