Minnesota avoided arbitration with one of their top forwards by signing Kevin Fiala to a one-year deal worth $5.1M. The Other Swiss Superman turned 25 in July and had both 20 goals and assists last season in 50 games played. He has averaged 68 points/82 games over the last two years with Minnesota, doing so while playing only 16 minutes a night. That trade has been a fantastic one for the Wild.

Fiala will still be an RFA when this deal is over, but unrestricted free agency is looming on the horizon. Don't forget that because of the Ryan Suter and Zach Parise buyouts, Minnesota will have over $26M in dead cap space spanning the 2022-23 and 2023-24 seasons. Assuming they can get Kirill Kaprizov signed to some sort of long-ish term contract, there may not be enough money left over to give Fiala the near-UFA contract he'll deserve. For my money, this is his last year in a Minnesota jersey unless Kaprizov leaves or is traded for futures.

Regardless, it gives us an opportunity to dig into Fiala a bit and what we can expect.

Minnesota was a top-10 scoring team last year but the concern here is the shooting percentage. They were third in the league by conversion rate, despite being tied for 20^th by expected goals. To wildly outscore (no pun intended) an expected goals rate like this year after year is not something a lot of teams can do. We are talking the Tampa Bays and Washingtons of the world. Marco Rossi being healthy and ready to go this year as a second-line centre behind Joel Eriksson Ek could go a long way in softening the potential decline in team shooting percentage. That is a big 'if' however.

The problem for Fiala is that if Eriksson Ek is used in a shutdown role and, let's say, Kaprizov/Rossi for the top scoring line, who's left for Fiala's line mates? He will be skating with Ryan Hartman, Victor Rask, Nico Sturm, and the like. That is a bit of a concern.

For his career, Fiala has been one of the handful of true dual threats in the NHL. He is great in transition, is a good playmaker, and of course is a dangerous sniper. When looking at his performance in 2021 by shot rate and primary shot assist rate, he ranked in similar rates to guys like Mitch Marner and Mikko Rantanen. The difference being Marner and Rantanen play 20 minutes a night (or more) with all-world centres, whereas Fiala just got a career-high 16:54 playing a lot with Hartman/Rask. While I truly believe Fiala can be a 35-goal, point-per-game player, he just won't get there this year unless he gets to a line with Rossi. Again, I think he has a year left before he's traded and the team just doesn't have the offensive centres at the moment. In two years, sure, but that doesn't help him right now.

So what is his real upside? If Kaprizov is back, can we expect Fiala to earn much more than 17 minutes a night? I don't think so. Guys who are elite fantasy options – like Rantanen and Marner – don't play 17 minutes a night. That caps Fiala's upside so assuming he's on some sort of pseudo-third line, it is hard seeing him mustering more than 70 points in a full year.

Of course, 70 points is still a very good fantasy season. Just remember he's not a huge peripherals guy. He does shoot, but he doesn't hit or block shots. The team also had an abysmal power play. Hopefully a Marco Rossi emergence can fix some of this, but that's another barrier to Fiala's true upside. He's generally a good power-play producer but I wonder if the team has that raw PP upside that franchises like Washington, Winnipeg, or Tampa Bay have.

Whatever Fiala's outcome this year, he's proven himself a top-end player and should fetch quite the return whenever (or if ever) he's traded. What I genuinely wonder is where his ADP will land because he did have a good year and there may be some hype with Rossi on the way. Does all the value get sucked out of his ADP as people get excited for this Minnesota team? We'll find out in a month or so.

For another perspective on Fiala, he's one of hundreds of players discussed in the newly-released Dobber Fantasy Guide. One thing Dobber brings up that I agree with, as mentioned earlier, is Fiala's power-play production could be elite if all goes right for him. It's just a matter of where that happens.

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The Nashville Predators signed Juuse Saros to a four-year extension worth $5M a season. After signing David Rittich for a year, the team now has their goaltending duo signed for the 2021-22 campaign. With Rittich coming around, I wonder if this doesn't mean a lot more starts for Saros. The only reason Rittich got as much run as he did in Calgary is because their goaltending situation was a disaster for most of the time between Miikka Kiprusoff and Jacob Markstrom. My guess is that if Rittich ends up with 30-40 starts in Nashville, Saros either got hurt or wildly underperformed. If Rittich gets 30-40 starts, Saros probably has little value.

The bigger question, I think, is what the quality of the team in front of Saros is going to be. This was a team in the bottom-10 by scoring last season and they didn't add a single roster player. The closest is Cody Glass, who hasn't looked like an NHLer to this point of his development. Ryan Ellis is gone and there may not be much for prospects to replace anyone in the lineup aside from Philip Tomasino. This was the definition of an average team last season that needed a god-tier run from Saros to do well. Does Ellis out and Tomasino/Myers/Glass in really help them enough to make up significant ground in 2021? Doesn't seem like it.

I am still bullish on Saros as a goalie but it is a position that is reliant on the quality of the rest of the entire team. Nashville seems heading towards some soft rebuild and that puts Saros's value in question, as it has been even before Pekka Rinne retired. He is a good goalie but this isn't a great team.

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I was away all weekend and missed some things. What jumped out at me was Jason Dickinson signing for three years with Vancouver.

Okay. Dickinson is a fine player. I would want him on my team, and three years at $7M total is a reasonable price for a great defensive player. But now this team has about $10.5M in cap space left for both Quinn Hughes and Elias Pettersson this summer. They might be tight to get there signing both to one-year deals. This is truly a complete disaster.

This is one of the most clear-cut cases of self-inflicted cap problems since the cap was introduced all those years ago. This is a team without a single player currently with a $7.5M cap hit or greater, and the guy with the highest cap hit was a player they traded for a month ago. They have a little over $10M in cap space left and to get the two players signed they might need double that. Tyler Myers, OEL, Tanner Pearson, Tucker Poolman, and now Jason Dickinson. All these are moves from Benning in very recent memory, none is a top-line, top-pair player, and their combined cap hit would be more than enough for Hughes/EP, and leave the team with an abundance of cap space to make smaller signings for better players. Good GMs do this – hello Tampa Bay – and bad GMs do not. And to think they were able to rid themselves of the Beagle and Roussel contracts while Sutter’s ran out. That is just sad sentence after sad sentence.

Benning is killing this team with a fresh, daily cut and we are nearing 1000 of those. I am excited to watch this team on the ice because they remind me a lot of what the Oilers should be: fun to watch offensively and a complete disaster in their own end. It'll make for entertaining hockey, at least.

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While thinking of Vancouver, what is their top-6 going to look like? They had key injuries last year, as well as that serious COVID problem, and that left J.T. Miller at centre full time. He was already taking a lot of faceoffs with EP on the ice, but this is something different. Miller centering his own line was a real thing, and it worked out fairly well. So do they leave Miller on a line with Pettersson, or do they move one of them to their own line and run Horvat-Pettersson-Miller as three centres.

My own feeling is leaving Miller/EP together. They are great together, Miller is great at faceoffs, and Dickinson seems like he'd make a good, defensive 3C if they want to try it out. That would leave the top-6 looking something like this:

Pearson-Horvat-Garland

Miller-Pettersson-Boeser

That seems like a very talented top two lines and both should be able to score a pile of goals. A lot changes if Miller gets moved to 3C though. They might even want to do that given the influx of wingers including Garland and possibly Podkolzin. What do you think? How does this play out?