Dumba Locks In

The list of pool worthy restricted free agents is slowly dwindling down, as Matt Dumba was the latest player to sign off on a new deal amongst those elite players.  Dumba and the Minnesota Wild agreed upon a 5-year, $30 million deal, late on Friday night, avoiding an arbitration hearing of his own and re-inserting his name into the Wild fold for the long-term.

The 24-year old really came into his own in the 2018 season, finishing in the top 20 among all defensemen in scoring with 14 goals and 50 points, playing in all 82 games for the Wild.  He's an all-situations type of player and that really showed in his increase in ice-time year over year, where he is now playing over 23 minutes a game.

Looking ahead to the 2019 season, the Wild still have a pretty good competitive team on paper, starting with the back end and working their way out.  Their top four defensemen can certainly hang with most of those in the league today.  I don't think I would go so far as to prognosticate a repeat performance for Dumba, however, the kid has plenty of talent, but now his name is really out there and he'll be a guy that other teams will focus on and try to take away at the point.  I can see this being a year, where he has to work his way around that.  It'll be tough, but he'll manage, just slightly below last year's pace.

Forwards	Cap	Defense	Cap	Goalies	Cap
Zach Parise	7.538	Ryan Suter	7.538	Devan Dubnyk	4.333
Mikael Granlund	5.750	Matt Dumba	6.000	Alex Stalock	0.650
Mikko Koivu	5.500	Jared Spurgeon	5.188
Nino Niederreiter	5.250	Jonas Brodin	4.167
Eric Staal	3.500	Greg Pateryn	2.250
Charlie Coyle	3.200	Nate Prosser	0.650
Marcus Foligno	2.875	Ryan Murphy	0.650
Eric Fehr	1.000
Luke Kunin	0.925
Jordan Greenway	0.917
Joel Eriksson Ek	0.894
Landon Ferraro	0.700
Matt Hendricks	0.700
Cal O'Reilly	0.700

The Wild have handful of RFAs left to re-sign in this off-season, but only one of any roster substance in Jason Zucker.  The Wild do have plenty of room for him, still holding onto about $6.45 million in cap space, after the 23-man roster that I have set up above here.  The Wild should be pretty pleased with where they are, in terms of the group that they have and the value that they have them in at.