The Wild Had No Choice But to Bet on Kirill Kaprizov
Minnesota just made him the NHL’s highest-paid player ever. The numbers show why he’s as indispensable as any star in the league.
Casual hockey fans may have been taken by surprise with Tuesday’s news that the Minnesota Wild had signed left wing Kirill Kaprizov to a record-breaking 8-year, $136 million, $17M/year AAV contract extension, shattering the previous high-water marks for total value (Alex Ovechkin’s $124 million, 13-year deal from 2008) and average annual value (Leon Draisaitl’s $14M/year over 8 years from last year). After all, Kaprizov isn’t exactly the biggest household name, even by hockey standards: He’s never finished better than seventh in MVP voting, and while his team has made the playoffs four times in his five NHL seasons, it’s never advanced to Round 2.
However, Kaprizov found himself approaching free agency at exactly the right moment, with the league’s salary cap projected to leap by nearly 30 percent over the next three seasons. And moreover, he was the right man for that moment — with a surprising case to be made as the league’s most indispensable player, forcing Minnesota to keep him around no matter the cost.
To the latter point, let’s first look at players who were most essential to their team’s efforts. And by that measure, few (if any) players have been more one-man shows on offense than Kaprizov in Minnesota. Since he made his NHL debut in 2020-21, Kaprizov has a team-high 386 points, nearly 100 more than second-ranked Mats Zuccarello at 298; he’s had a hand in 32 percent of the team’s goals, scoring 15 percent of them personally (a share only surpassed by Auston Matthews, Draisaitl and Ovechkin over the same span).
And when he was healthy, Kaprizov outdid himself in that regard last season. During the 41 games he suited up for in 2024-25, Minnesota scored 124 goals — so Kaprizov’s 56 points represented 45 percent of the team’s output when he played, and his 25 goals were 20 percent on their own.
