Regular Season Review: The Lizard’s First Season with Minnesota Wild

Reviewing Mats Zuccarello’s First Full Season with Minnesota Wild.

Just a reminder that this series of articles covering each Minnesota Wild players’ performance will take into account each player’s contract, offensive production, and overall play using analytics and our perceptions to determine each player’s impact and value to the Wild this season.

Starting from the worst, each article will work its way up until the last article in the series which features the player who, in our eyes, had the best regular season.

#19 Mats Zuccarello

"Aaron: DBrandon: CLake: C+"

Former GM Paul Fenton acquired Zuccarello through free agency last summer and gave Zuccarello a nice five-year contract with a $6 million AAV, along with a full NMC. In the future, that will force the Wild to protect him in the upcoming Seattle Expansion Draft.

I don’t think it took much persuasion for Zuccarello to agree to terms on such a lucrative contract as a near 32-year-old with his prime behind him. Just so it is clear, Mats Zuccarello was a fantastic first-line winger in his years with New York and he’s a fine player with Minnesota, Paul Fenton overpaid for his services and the full no-move protection will likely cost the Wild one of their young talents.

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Mats Zuccarello had a tough first season with the Wild. It wasn’t terrible, but Wild fans were hoping for better. This was Zuccarello’s first year on his five-year contract. This is a bit worrisome. If this is an indicator of what the backend of his contract will be like, then that will become problematic fast.

Zuccarello collected 15 goals, 22 assists for 37 points in 65 games with an average ice time of roughly 16 minutes, which is down from previous years. The reality is that Zuccarello is getting paid to be a top-six winger, so next season will likely be an indicator if we can get anything close to Eric Staal worthy production around this age. Granted, Zuccarello is not Staal, and frankly never was, but next season will be an indicator of what kind of production to expect from Zuccarello.

To Zuccarello’s defense, his season was cut short due to COVID-19, so maybe he could have gotten into the 20-goal/50-point range. As well as that, Zuccarello maybe needs more time to gain some chemistry and find his role in a Wild uniform.

Time will tell.

Zuccarello ranked 11th in GF/60 (Goals For Per 60), 14th in GA/60 (Goals Against Per 60), 15th in xGF/60 (Expected Goals For Per 60), 12th in xGA/60 (Expected Goals Against per 60), 19th in CF/60 (Corsi For Per 60), 13th in CA/60 (Corsi Against Per 60) among Minnesota Wild players.

Zuccarello did offer 7.1 GAR (Goals Above Replacement) and 1.3 WAR (Wins Above Replacement) which ranked 11th among Wild players, he was middle of the pack in regards to Evolving Hockey’s WAR metric.

Overall, Zuccarello had an okay season.

Highlight Of The Year

This was my favorite Zuccarello goal, nice hand-eye coordination eh?

Zuccarello got emotional as he watched the nice tribute!

All Stats from Evolving Hockey, NHL.com, Hockey Reference, & CapFriendly