Team news and recap for the 25-26 preseason
The Minnesota Wild had a crazy start to the new season of hockey starting with all the trade rumors and contract talk surrounding our superstar Kirill Kaprizov, talking about our new young players, a couple injuries among players and a long-term deal contract signed with Filip Gustavsson.
Kirill Kaprizov deal
On Tuesday September 9th, Kirill Kaprizov was offered an 8-year, $128 million deal that he later turned down. There was many different rumors circulating around talking about why he did it, for example he wanted to leave Minnesota because he wanted a team with higher probability of winning a stanley cup or just for the soul fact that it was an 8-year deal and he knew that eventually the cap would go up so he would prefer to sign a shorter term deal. Kirill later spoke saying that he loves being in Minnesota and even said that he considers it a second home. He also stated that he just wanted to focus on playing hockey and leave the contract deals up to his agents. After everyone having their own thoughts, Minnesota fans were thrilled to hear that on September 30th, Kirill signed an 8-year contract deal with the Wild for $136 million and said that he was relieved this all was over and that it had become a big distraction for him. During an interview with Bill Guerin, Kirill also expressed happiness and a strong desire to stay with the team saying "I'm just happy to keep doing what we do and just winning here. I hope for sure. I believe one day the stanley cup is coming".
New young players and updated roster
In this new upcoming season we can look forward to seeing a couple new young players with bright futures ahead. Here we will get some insite on these players and learn a little about who they are and the impact they are expected to have on the Wild.
Danila Yurov is a 21 year old forward who signed an entry level deal in May of 2025 where he began his transition to the NHL. He is expected to play a big part in the Wilds future with his strong work ethic and important role on the team.
Liam Ohgren is a 21 year old first pick forward, who is hoping to make his full jump to the Wild after spending last season going between the NHL and the AHL. The wild wants him to focus on assertivenss to earn his consistent lineup spot.
Hunter Haight is a 21 year old forward who made his debut in the AHL last season and hopefully on track for some more ice time this season.
David Jiricek is a 21 year old defensemen that the Wild got in a trade from the Columbus Blue Jackets in November of 2024. The Wild are hoping for him to be a two-way defensemen while also having an offensive upside.
Zeev Buium is a 19 year old defensemen that the Wild want to pair with Brock Faber. He is also said to be showing great potential to become an offensive-defensemen that can attribute to the teams top 4.
Jesper Wallstedt is a 22 year old goalie who was selected in a first round pick in 2020 and has played in the AHL with a couple apperances in the NHL. He is said to hopefully be our starting goaltender.
Wild player injuries
At the start of this season you may have noticed that we are missing a couple familiar faces and here I am going to cover who, why and when they are expected to be back. First the most noticable player missing would be Mats Zuccarello, it is said that right before the Wilds training camp that Mats attained a lower-body injury from a puck to the midsection that required a surgery. He is expected to be out for a minimum of 7-8 weeks. Next, Jonas Brodin, in June Brodin underwent a surgery for an upper body injury that happened during the offseason. He is hopefully going to return sooner than originally expected, with his revovery progressing well. He has been wearing a non-contact jersey while participating in a couple non-contact drills at the training camp. Lastly, we will cover Nico Sturm. Sturm is suffering from a significant back injury that he was dealing with all throughout training camp. He did return for the final preseason game, but because of that he suffered a set back that has now placed him on IR (injured reserve). There is no news on when Sturm will return, but coach John Hynes stated that he is expected to be out for a significant amount of time, which lead the Wild to recall Hunter Haight.
Filip Gustavsson Contract deal
On October 4th 2025, Filip Gustavsson signed a long-term contract deal with the Wild for $34 million, which will start up in the 26-27 season and go up until the 30-31 season. The wild state that even with this new contract deal it doesn't change their high hopes and plans for goaltender Jesper Wallstedt.
Preseason games summary
The Minnesota Wild played 6 preseason games. September 21st/September 30th they faced the Winnipeg Jets, September 23rd/September 25th the Dallas Stars and September 28th/October 3rd the Chicago Blackhawks. Here I am going to give a breif rundown of how those games went.
During our first preseason game of the year and our first encounter with the Jets, the Wild ended up beating them 3-2 during overtime at the Jets home arena. The first period ended with Winnipeg being up 2-0. We had 2 penalties being Trenin with tripping and Haight with hooking. The second period ended with us still being down, but the score was 1-2 thanks to Yakov Trenin, so things started looking up for us. We also stayed out of the penalty box for this period. Onto the third, Hunter Haight tied it up putting us into overtime at 2-2 with Winnipeg getting 2 penalties and Trenin getting sent back to the box for tripping again. We were able to win having Trenin score our overtime goal and putting us at 3-2 to end the game, but not before getting one more penalty against Jiricek for tripping. Our second time meeting Winnipeg was our home game, where we were just as lucky and able to win 3-2. In the first period we kept the score even with Matt Boldy scoring the first goal of the night and us getting no penalties. Period two we were able to take the lead with both Marcus Foligno and Kirill Kaprizov scoring goals putting the score to 3-2, we did however get 2 penalties this period against Danila Yurov for tripping and then too many men on the ice. During the third period we suffered a couple big penalties against Trenin and Jiricek for roughing and boarding, but lucky for us were able to keep the score giving us the win.
Our first meet with the Dallas Stars at their home arena started out strong with David Jiricek scoring our first goal in the first period and us being up 1-0 up until the third period. However we did get a couple penalties throughout that time, Riley Heidt getting tripping and Rasmus Kumpulainen getting slashing in the first period. Moving onto the third period Dallas scored 2 goals and Ben Gleason scored our second goal for us tieing it up and putting us into overtime. Both teams got 2 more penalties that period, with ours being Bradley Marek for fighting and Caedan Bankier for tripping. Sadly in overtime the Stars took the win leaving our ending score 2-3. I wish I could say our meeting with them the second time at our home arena went better, but sadly we ended the game with a score of 2-5. We again started strong with Marco Rossi scoring both of our goals within 10-15 seconds of each other in the first period and Dallas ending the first period at no goals, with no penalties from either team, but during period two Dallas was able to score one on us with us getting 2 penalties, one against Jiricek for interference and one for slashing against Marco Rossi. The third period is where it all went downhill with Dallas scoring 4 goals and us getting a hooking penalty against Riley Heidt and a high-sticking against Ben Gleason ending the game at 2-5.
Heading over to Chicago for our first game against the Blackhawks, we ended the first period 0-1 with a penalty agaisnt Liam Ohgren for holding. Entering the second period we were able to get our first goal of the game by Hunter Haight, but Chicago was able to match us and get their second goal. We also got a penalty for tripping agaisnt Ryan Hartman. For period three the good news is that we were able to stay out of the box, but the bad news is that we were unable to catch up to Chicago and they ended up getting 2 more goals on us leaving the final score for that game at 4-1. Our second meet with Chicago, which also happened to be our final preseaon game of the year we started out the first period with the odds not looking to great in our favor, ending it at 0-2 with only one penalty being against Liam Ohgren for interference. Period two is where it started to look up for us when Vladimir Tarasenko, Ryan Hartman and Joel Ericksson Ek all scored giving us the lead of 3-2, but to go with those three goals we also got three penalties. Jake Middleton and Yakov Trenin both got roughing and Zeev Buium got holding. We were able to keep that lead through the third period ending the final preseason game in a win, but not before getting one more penalty against Ericksson Ek for roughing.
Summing it all up we were able to end the preseason with 3 wins, 3 losses and around 23 penalties staying above the Jets and coming back from our loss with the Blackhawks. We have to keep working hard and being agressive so that next time we meet the Stars, we can also take a win against them. In conclusion I would like to say that we had a pretty productive preseason, and a good warm up for the regular season games. It will be exciting to see how well the team plays and to watch the new players grow. Cheers to the start of another great season in the state of hockey!