That only affects so much. Besides sometimes people get more ice time for playing on a ****ty team and more opportunity.

LA wins this easily. They took advantage of MN's problems; which they should have.

MN should have signed Fiala long term last offseason when he was asking for a $7m x 7 deal.

"Welcome to Capfriendly, where the rules are made up and the points don't matter!"

That clever reference is humor. You'll probably call it trolling.

Few LAK ACGMs biases:

- I doubt LAK fans would make 1:1 trade Bjornfot:Chychrun, because they "need another LD, not just upgrade". Bjornfot is not acceptable trading piece in any trade
- MTL got Kale Clague for free. LAK fans are probably still refusing his trades for late 1st round pick and see him as their future on the blue line
- Faber/Grans dilemma. LAK ACGMS would trade away Grans (LAK's only bigger D-prospect) for a bag of pucks. On the other hand, for some to LAK ACGM's known reason, should Faber be untouchable. But think for a second, they play the same position and they were both 2020 Draft picks. Grans was higher pick than Faber. There are odds LAK's management might be higher on Grans than on Faber And if rival fans want to strip away Grans and not Faber, there must be something they don't see on Swede
- who is next on the block? Kings fans are saying Roy is untouchable ("he is the only LAK D-man who can play defense". Who's Doughty?). That's a kiss of death, Roy won't last for long in LA

Knew this was coming since the buyouts
Still hurts
The package is okay, but Fiala could have got much more for us
Good luck in LA Kevin

Fair deal. LA gave up less than they would had they just signed him as a RFA, while not needed to compete with a dozen other teams.

That said, I'm not sure Fiala will live up to this contract, as last season was clearly his best and I don't know if it was a fluke.

Humour is fine but of the last six (ish) posts of yours that us moderators have either deleted, warned, or infracted, you're blatantly out of line. At some point you need to take responsibility for what you call "humour".

Fiala played only 5% of the time with Kaprizov. He had a hell of an impressive run in Minnesota on the 2nd line with little PP time.

Agreed. Little leverage but Fiala is a game changer and LA gave up practically nothing,

What?

he was playing in first pair of powerplay though. most of the timw though, was 5th total in power play ice time.

This is the part most people don't seem to understand. The buyouts allowed them to keep Fiala one more year to make another attempt at a playoff run. Maybe Guerin could have gotten a bit more last year (doubtful imo) but there was simply no way to keep him. With Boldy being due a pay raise next year, even if they moved Dumba and Jost to free up cap space to keep Fiala another year, how do you make it work next year when you have to replace them AND give Boldy a raise as well as account for a little bit more in dead cap for the buyouts? Simply put there was no reasonable way to keep Fiala and whether this deal ends up being good or bad for the Wild will be seen in a few years when we see what the pick ends up being and if Faber becomes a contributing presence on their defense.

The "blatantly out of line" qualification when 2 of them were retracted is pretty rich IMO.

If you have issues when I ask someone to "find a better argument" when they call me an idiot or when I answer to someone giving me the finger that he has "no class" (btw that's a fact, not a personnal attack, I don't do those), frankly it says more about your work than anything. I personally think I wasn't out of line at all, but like the saying goes "Nerver argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference".

I would end by saying that if I was a troll I wouldn't have such a good like ratio, but I got an Infraction the only time I boasted about my number of likes, so I'll just shut up now. 🤷🏻

Have a great draft everyone!

I’m trying to judge only the trade here, not the signing, though given the timing they are obviously connected.

Good trade for LA. They’re already a playoff team and they add a top 6 winger in his prime without giving up a roster player. They may have to make some other moves to stay under the cap, but they got good value in this trade.

Everyone is saying that Minnesota had to trade Fiala, but I’m not convinced that they couldn’t have found a way to keep him, at least for this coming season. Yes, the buyouts are hurting them, but they have $6.5M in cap space with all their other core players signed. They do need to spend some of that on a couple of depth players and a backup goalie, but it didn’t seem insurmountable to me.

On the other hand, if Fiala didn’t want to sign in Minnesota for a number that the team thought was fair, and they want that cap space for something else (Fleury?), then trading him for the best package of draft picks and/or entry level players they could get makes sense. If somebody signed him to an offer sheet, the compensation would have been a 1st, a 2nd and a 3rd round draft pick, so if Faber is better than a 2nd and a 3rd, this is a good return. My opinion is that a good prospect from a recent draft is better than a pick in an upcoming draft because, being a little older, he should be closer to NHL-ready and more of a known quantity.

I’m not sure they would have got more for him last year. He wasn’t a point-per-game guy then.

Even if they could have got a bit more for him last year, it still made sense to keep him because it looked like they had a realistic chance at a cup run. The only benefit to trading him last year would have been to avoid having to protect him in the expansion draft, but that problem went away when they decided to buy out Parise and Suter.

I really like this one for both sides. Would Fiala have brought more on the open market if he had term and Minnesota wasn't in a cap crunch? Probably. But I think the Wild got a fair return given the circumstances they're in. Meanwhile, LA solidifies their top 6 and now looks poised to return to the top of the Pacific.

Why did I just find out about this trade now?

Sorry, I was going to call you yesterday but forgot.

I hadn’t thought of that. I always thought that the buyouts were because of the expansion draft – Suter and Parise had no-move clauses so they would have had to protect them if they didn’t buy them out, which meant they would have lost Dumba or a top-6 forward to Seattle instead of Soucy – but now that you mention it, it also gave the team a one-time cap savings of about $10M last season to help them make a run at the cup. Though their cup run fell short, that’s an additional benefit to the buyouts that I hadn’t considered.



I agree. The buyouts were a smart move making the best of a really bad situation. The only good thing about those contracts was that they were front-loaded, making it easy to buy out the last four years.

Big white n for the kings imo,

The market is beginning to take shape people

This is probably the minimum I expected Fiala to fetch, so I say fair deal

I understand Minnesota couldn't make it work Salary wise, but with the season Fiala just had, this is a steal for LA. A potential franchise level winger and LA gave up no substantial assets.

Wild couldn't afforded to re-sign him. Which makes this an opportunistic win for LA.

Considering the Wild were between a rock and a hard place, this haul is very good. The Kings win on the merit of getting the best player in the deal, of course, but it's one of those rare ones where both benefit a lot.

Pens Fans lol'd at me for saying we got the wrong winger in the Zucker Trade.

Then they tried to tell me that we couldn't have got Fiala for what we gave up for Zucker, when Fiala was struggling.....

He just got the same package we wasted on Zucker.