Firstly – yes, I know, it’s been a while. Every year I forget that the first month of the hockey work season is the biggest grind, and I forget about the mental shift that comes with it. I’ve had a few ideas that I’ve meant to come back to and then lost the time or the energy. Racing to set this site up before that all started was probably a savvy idea. Racing to get started on putting stuff out, well, maybe I could’ve waited six weeks. I’m going to try to back-write a bit on the personal side about September in the coming days, and then try to stay up to date on the hockey front in October. We’ll see how that goes.
For now, we’re here again, and we’re armed with some pretty big NHL news. The Minnesota Wild announced that they’d be keeping Kirill Kaprizov – a talent somewhere between superstar and megastar, for the next nine years (eight following this upcoming 2025/26 season). Many were wondering if this was a deal that would get done ahead of opening night, or if Kaprizov would hit unrestricted free agency in the summer. That was answered, and Wild fans felt a sense of relief on Tuesday.
And then, a bit of sticker shock.
Kaprizov’s deal comes in at a total salary of $136,000,000 USD – the highest in league history by $12 million, beating Alex Ovechkin’s thirteen-year deal signed in 2008. Moreover, it comes in at the highest Annual Average Value, or AAV, in the salary cap era by a large margin, at a whopping $17 million per season. To put that into context, it’s raw cap hit is 21.4% higher than the next highest deal in league history (Leon Draisaitl, $14 million), and assuming a $104 million salary cap in 2026/27, it’s opening cap percentage of 16.34% is the highest since the previously mentioned Ovechkin deal eighteen years ago.
Players are allowed to take up a maximum of 20% of the salary cap ceiling, last achieved by Brad Richards’ five-year contract extension signed in 2006 at a max $7.8 million AAV. Richards played just just another year and a half with the Tampa Bay Lightning before they moved him to the Dallas Stars.
| Contract | Raw AAV | Contract | Cap% |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kirill Kaprizov, 2026 | $17,000,000 | Brad Richards, 2006 | 20.00% |
| Leon Draisaitl, 2025 | $14,000,000 | Niklas Lidstrom, 2006 | 19.49% |
| Auston Matthews, 2024 | $13,250,000 | Zdeno Chara, 2006 | 17.05% |
| Nathan MacKinnon, 2023 | $12,600,000 | Alex Ovechkin, 2009 | 16.75% |
| Connor McDavid, 2018 | $12,500,000 | Connor McDavid, 2018 | 15.72% |
Deals that chased the 20% maximum were more common in the early days of the salary cap, as teams experimented with finding the right balance of payment distrubtion, and as the cap ceiling increased from $39 million in 2005/06 to $64.3 million in 2011/12, a jump of 65% in just six seasons. This allowed for a contract like Richards’ to go from league max 20% at the time of early extension to a 12.1% cap hit as he entered free agency.
By comparison, the current NHL is coming off it’s biggest cap ceiling stagnation ever, instigated largely by the COVID-19 pandemic and a balancing of player-owner escrow that followed. Between 2018/19 to 2024/25, a similar six-year window, the cap increased from $79.5 million to $88 million, an increase of just 10.6% – and over half of which came in the sixth year. An example of a contract that did not age with the same curve as early cap era superstars with this free in mind is Toronto’s John Tavares – signed at $11 million per year for seven years, the hope was that the deal would mature into a small share of the team’s pie by its end. Entering at 13.8% of the cap, when he got to his sixth anniversary of signing, his AAV had only slid to 13.2% of the ceiling.
With the COVID issues out of the way, the league is hoping for another cap explosion, with a celing of $95.5 million this year, $104 million in 2026/27, and $113.5 million in 2027/28. If the NHL can continue this cap climb at the inflated 9% rate beyond the already priced-in years, Kaprizov’s deal will come in at an 11.6% cap hit at the sixth anniversary of the signing, and 8.9% hit at its terminus. Assuming that these catch-up spikes are outliers and the league goes to something closer to the 5% annual growth it had before the pandemic, we’re looking at 12.9% and 11.2% cap percentages respecfully – more in line with the Richards curve, and still outperforming the deals that got weighted down between 2018/19 and 2023/24.
So Is This A Good Deal Or Not?
The answer here, in short, is “it’s complicated”. After all, there are two schools of thought when it comes to grading out contract value with superstars.
On the first door, you have “it’s almost impossible to overpay a superstar”, and there’s a lot of truth to that.
For example, Dom Luszczyszyn’s projection model has Kaprizov’s market value at $15 million, which would still be the highest AAV in the league by $1,000,000 or 7% despite being in and around the 10th-best player in the league range on talent & impact.
Gamebreakers are an extremely rare currency in the NHL, and they don’t move around very often. It makes sense for teams to be more willing to spend a premium amount to ensure that they have those players on the ice for them as much as possible. Rather than spending premium amounts on having the “right” depth guys, ensure you possess what is hardest to replace.
On the other hand, you have peer-relative value, where even if you believe that superstars are generally underpaid by a league that spends too much of their budget on the second and third layer of talent, you still have to compare players to those surrounding them. In that sense, is Kaprizov’s talent level one that merits earning 21% more than Leon Drasaitl and 42% more than Mitch Marner and Mikko Rantanen – all players on new deals this year? What about players in the middle of pre-boom deals that will leave room open for their teams to add?
Apologies for going back to the Covid-era Leafs well (this is a Toronto-based blog, it is what it is), Marner’s second contract in 2019 is an example of this counter-argument, and one I wrote about to much noise at the time. Marner settled on a $10.893 million cap hit over six years, and even with the cap freeze, its hard to argue that he didn’t overperform it on a raw scale. At the same time, it was a markedly higher cap percentage than historical peers before him had got at the same time. My anchor for him before the deal was Patrick Kane’s second deal, which would’ve put Marner in the low $9-million range adjusting for cap inflation. He ultimately got more, while Rantanen took $9.25 million on a similar deal and players like Matthew Tkachuk and Brayden Point took about $7 million on bridges. Despite providing raw value, the lack of peer value made Marner look greedy in his home market and become a big part of his heel turn within the fanbase, leading to his departure this summer. It also meant there was $2 million that his contending team couldn’t spend in other areas – not his responsiblity, but it adds up if the team wants to contend, and other teams had the flexiblity his peers afforded them.
There’s also the sneaky factor of Kaprizov’s age. He’s not on the cusp of retirement by any means, but I do wonder if some people forget that he came into the league five full seasons after being drafted. That is to say, Kaprizov’s relatively young NHL career makes him feel relatively young, but the new deal will kick in when he’s 29 and bring him to his Age 36 season. Now, at his talent level, and with his play style, you still should get a lot of elite years out of that. Ask Capitals fans if they’d take the 29-36 years of Ovechkin’s contract again – five Rockets, 596 points in 595 games, and a Stanley Cup – and they’ll probably say yes. But as far as age curves go, you’re hoping for several years of consistent flight with maybe the start of a gentle landing towards the end, rather than buying an incline like McDavid’s 2018 deal.
Should Minnesota Have Done It?
If you’ve read the above, you’re probably expecting me to say that this is a bad contract and that Minnesota would’ve been better off walking away from the deal.
That’s not what I’ll be saying. I do think the contract in raw, techncial terms is inefficent, and that if you’re goal is to maximize wins, you’re not getting as much from this deal as other teams are getting from their gamebreakers. It’s a lot of commitment by cap percentage, much more than similarly-talented players or even better players across the league, and it’s possible that we’ve already seen Kaprizov’s best season. The sheer amount accepted here will make it more difficult for the Wild to optimize the group around him.
But going back to the first point of the last block, it’s really hard to replace the type of player that can win you a game on his own. They are so rarely available in free agency or via trade – you pretty much have to acquire them before they peak (via the draft if you’re shrewd and/or lucky, occasionally by other means if you’re very shrewd and/or lucky).
The Wild organization are espceially aware of this, both from a position of results and a more emotional means of stardom. Minnesota are often poked fun at as arguably the league’s most indifferent team – rarely bad enough to mock, rarely good enough to be scared of, and not often very exciting. Before Kaprizov’s arrival in 2020/21, the only real star power the team had amassed in two decades of play was Marian Gaborik’s run from 2000 to 2009, most of which only really felt like superstardom for four or five injury-filled years. At the end of his second contract, he did what many worried Kaprizov would do, walking to free agency and looking for the big city, signing with the New York Rangers and leaving the Wild with nothing but memories in return.
Minnesota is and forever will be a hockey hotbed, but the Wild are an accessory of that rather than its roots, with youth hockey, collegiate hockey, and even memories of the North Stars past being the pulse that fuels the state, so while the team isn’t ever really in jeopardy of empty buildings, they still need to create an incentive to come watch. You can do that with sustained elite play, or you can do that with must-see TV. The team has better odds at the former with Kaprizov than without him, even at this price, and they’re guaranteed the latter as long as he’s in the lineup.
They know that, too, all the way at the top. Team owner Craig Leipold has spent the last year and change talking about his hopes and his expectations for this extension to anyone who would listen, public or private, in a way that you don’t really see in the game. Frankly, that probably give Kaprizov’s camp the leverage they needed to maximize the final figures here, so maybe that’s not to be repeated. But in the end, they’re probably more concerned with getting the job done.
Will This Set A Precedent?
A big question that’s come out of the aftermath here, is what this deal will mean for other super-elite contracts coming up. For those keeping score, that includes the likes of Artemi Panarin, Jack Eichel and the big man himself, Connor McDavid this summer.
McDavid especially is getting the focus here, as the expectation was always for him to become the league’s highest paid player again once he singed his deal. Of course, the benchmark for that has just moved up $3 million, and we’re talking about a player who has been the most valuable in the league over the past five years rather than somewhere around the range of Top 10. (Evolving Hockey, the one hockey stats platform you’d expect to have a pro-Wild bias, measures McDavid’s Goals Above Replacement impact at about a 47% higher rate than Kaprizov over the last five years, 53% higher over the past three, and 19% higher last year).
So if Kaprizov is getting $17 million or 16.3%, where does McDavid sit? $20 million? Does he got the full 20% ($20.8 million)?
Honestly, I don’t know that this deal moves that needle significantly. I think the situations are so much different here compared to everywhere else. Not to say that Kaprizov doesn’t want to win, but most of the other mega-elite talent lands on contenders, or at least teams that were expecting to be contenders when the deals were signed (sorry, David Pastrnak), and while some of these players have “set new standards” along the way, they generally haven’t blown them out of the water to give their teams some wiggle room. When Nathan MacKinnon was the first to cross the McDavid line, he only eclipsed it by $100,000. Auston Matthews’ jump over MacKinnon was by $650,000, and Draisaitl’s over Matthews was $750,000. Before this week, McDavid’s deal seven years ago was the last time that we saw the highest salary record get cleared by more than the price of a minimum salary player.
In McDavid’s case in particular, I see a player that’s come hauntingly close to the promised land twice now, and is determined to get across the finish line, both for his personal drive and for the sake of his legacy. Smashing the contract record is great for the bag and is arguably his responsibility as a union worker – at least, more so than balancing his GM’s budget for him – but the hard salary cap comes with realities.
My ultimate guess with McDavid remains that he stays with the Oilers, and that the waiting came here is to create urgency to keep building towards a winner. Nothing he does on the ice this season will change his ability to get a blank cheque for blank years, so he’s in no rush to sign any paperwork. Prior to this deal I would’ve guessed the final price would come in at a $15.97 million AAV with an undetermined term – enough to set a precedent, and exactly enough to create a fun $29.97 million vanity combo with him and Draisaitl. Now, maybe it’s a MacKinnon deal where he takes $17.1 just to keep it moving, but unless he wins this year, doesn’t care about winning again immediately, and tests the market, I don’t see him rocking the boat much further.
If McDavid doesn’t, it’ll difficult for others to be the ones to do the same, particularly if they’re looking to be on top teams. It seems much more likely that Kaprizov will be seen as the outlier, a great player that a team absolutely had to keep and spared no expense to get the question out of the way. Going back to the Marner-Rantanen 2019 point I made about peer comparables earlier, the latter signed his lesser deal two weeks after the former signed his. Sometimes, an outlier just gets breezed by.
The increase in cap space will lead to more spending, but if I had to guess, it’s going to be more focused on teams taking chances on potential. The teams that dominated the COVID-freeze years were the ones who managed to commit to their very good to great players before they proved it, finding surplus value that wasn’t necessarily seen in the moment. I suspect the cap boosts will go to paying even more aggressively on potential with term – think Luke Hughes, Mason McTavish, Dustin Wolf, Frank Nazar, Lukas Dostal, Logan Stankoven and Matthew Knies among recent signings – in hopes of finding jackpots, along with the the typical diamond in the rough chasing along the fringes.
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