After the Minnesota Wild were eliminated by the St. Louis Blues, it opened a key offseason for General Manager Bill Guerin, none more in the eye of the public than the future of Kevin Fiala.
“I mean, we’d love to have Kevin back,” Guerin said Tuesday. “I don’t know if it’s going to be possible. But we have to dig into it a little bit and to see what we could possibly do. But there is uncertainty.”
On the surface, it looks like an easy decision. At 25 years old, Fiala is coming off a career year with 85 points (33 G, 52 A) in 82 games. He also hit an extra gear when Matt Boldy was called up on Jan. 6, recording 64 points and 26 goals over the final 51 games.
This type of production has been the standard for Fiala in the regular season. Over the past three years, he has averaged 0.91 points per game, but the issue has been Fiala’s lack of production in the playoffs.
Since Fiala recorded four points (3 G, 1 A) during a 2020 play-in series against the Vancouver Canucks, he has just five points over his last 13 playoff games. That includes a no-show against the Blues, where Fiala didn’t score a goal and had just three assists in six games.
The performance is reminiscent of Jason Zucker, who ranks fourth in Wild history with 132 career goals but had just four goals in 31 playoff games. That includes the 2017-18 season, where at age 26, Zucker scored a career-high 33 goals during the regular season but failed to record a point in a five-game series against the Winnipeg Jets.
Two years later, Guerin traded Zucker to the Pittsburgh Penguins and it’s fair to wonder if Fiala could have the same fate.
After playing last season on a one-year, $5.1 million deal, Fiala is a restricted free agent. Of this year’s pending free agents, only Johnny Gaudreau, Matthew Tkachuk and Nazem Kadri recorded more points last season.
If we add Filip Forsberg, who recorded 84 points with Nashville, the average salary of those four players according to Cap Friendly was $5.8 million. If we take out 31-year-old Kadri, that number jumps to $6.2 million.
If the Wild were to agree to a deal with an average annual value of the latter number, Fiala would become the second-highest paid player on the team behind Kirill Kaprizov ($9 million).
That would be doable for a team in a normal cap situation, but not for the Wild.
After buying out Ryan Suter and Zach Parise last offseason, the Wild are heading into the brunt of the financial impact of that decision. Minnesota will have $12.7 million in dead money for the 2022-23 season and that number will increase to $14.7 million during the 2023-24 and 2024-25 seasons.
With just $5.6 million in cap space heading into the summer, the Wild need to decide if it would be easier to replace Fiala or trade someone like Matt Dumba and Jonas Brodin, who have matching $6 million salaries for next season.
“Hey look, we can do anything,” Guerin said. “But at what cost?”
