Minnesota Wild Make Qualifying Offers to Seven RFAs

The Minnesota Wild made qualifying offers to seven players before the NHL draft’s second round began Saturday. While this move may seem simple it marks the first move in what is to be a crazy free-agency period that will play out in the coming weeks.

The Minnesota Wild’s overall free-agent strategy may be still very up in the air as negotiations with unrestricted free-agents started on Friday at midnight just after the conclusion of round one of the draft. When it comes to their restricted free-agents, that plan seems to become a lot clearer as the Wild made qualifying offers to seven different RFAs before the draft’s second round started on Saturday.

So very quickly before we continue further for the benefit of all of you out there that don’t know what a qualifying offer is, I’ll explain quickly and simply. A qualifying offer is only the first step in signing a RFA, it basically is done to insure that the team will retain negotiating rights to a player. A qualifying offer is a simple place to start to negotiate from, but in most cases the player and team will agree to a contract differing from the qualifying offer. There are rules governing how much that offer needs to be, but in the interest of time we’ll skip that for now.

Now that you know that…the Wild decided to make qualifying offers to RFAs Mathew Dumba, Darcy Kuemper, Jason Zucker, Zac Dalpe, Jordan Schroeder, Zach Palmquist, and Tyler Graovac. To be honest there are no real surprises here as all these names were expected to be qualified. The Wild now need to negotiate with these players to sign for the qualifying offer or a different amount depending on the situation. Or there is a third option, the Wild can still trade these players now that they have made the qualifying offer and it will be up to the team that acquires them to negotiate further terms with the player.

In the case of Dumba and Kuemper who have lots of rumors swirling about their futures, it’s important that the expectations be managed now. By qualifying them, the Wild have not committed to keeping or dealing them, they have simply decided to retain them as an asset in which to either sign or move. Had the Wild not made them a qualifying offer, they would have become UFAs and been free to sign anywhere.

Not qualifying an RFA means two things really. First is that you don’t have a place in the organization for the player and do not want to use any more salary cap on that player. Second is that you feel that player is largely untradeable. If you qualify a player and they turn around and trade that player you will get something in return the organization will value for without actually spending any money on that player. The negotiation of that RFA falls to the team that acquires him and thus they eat the cap space.

That being said it’s worth mentioning that the Wild actually did not offer qualifying offers to goaltender Brody Hoffman, and forwards Brett Bulmer, Raphael Bussieres, Jared Knight, and Scott Sabourin. Like the group that did get qualifying offers, the Wild got it right with this group and this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. These players largely are an underachieving group that fit the description we just covered on why you wouldn’t qualify an RFA.