Wild trade Kevin Fiala to Kings for first-round pick and Gophers captain Brock Faber

Wild general manager Bill Guerin has been dropping hints about Kevin Fiala’s future for the better part of six months.

Asked about Fiala in March after the NHL trade deadline, Guerin made it clear that he already had a plan. Asked about Fiala in April before the playoffs, Guerin joked that a player is only as good as his last game. Asked about Fiala in May after the Wild lost to the St. Louis Blues in the first round, Guerin admitted he wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to make the money work.

Thus, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the Wild flipped Fiala’s rights to the Los Angeles Kings on Wednesday afternoon in exchange for the No. 19 pick in the 2022 NHL Draft, along with Gophers men’s hockey captain Brock Faber.

As much as the Wild would have loved to keep Fiala around long term, pairing him with Kirill Kaprizov for the foreseeable future, they simply couldn’t afford him.

Not after Fiala, a 25-year-old from Switzerland, put himself in position for a big raise with 33 goals and 52 assists last season. Not with the Wild dealing with the consequences of buying out the big contracts of Zach Parise and Ryan Suter last offseason.

“We’ve been down the road a couple times with Kevin already,” Guerin said. “We knew we just were not going to be able to do it. We knew that. They knew that. There’s no sense in trying to screw around and give them a low-ball deal. It’s not going to work. We knew we were going to have to move him.”

Originally acquired by the Wild on Feb. 25, 2019 in a trade with Nashville, Fiala took massive strides as a member of the organization. He went from a frustrating player with a tantalizing skill set to a legitimate game-breaker who carried the Wild many times over the past couples of seasons.

That improvement from Fiala is a big reason he’s no longer on the roster. His next contract likely will pay him upwards of $8 million a season, money the Wild don’t have with roughly $12.7 million in dead cap tied up in the Parise and Suter buyouts for the 2022-23 season. That figure will jump to about $14.7 million in dead cap for the 2023-24 season and 2024-25 season.

“Honestly, to keep him we’d have to trade three guys and deplete our team more,” Guerin said. “It just didn’t fit.”

Though many teams were interested in getting Fiala, the Kings made it clear from the onset how motivated they were to get it done sooner than later. There was no feeling-out process, which, according to Guerin, made it easy to make a deal.

For the Wild, the return included a couple of nice building blocks, including the No. 19 pick in next Thursday’s opening round of the draft, as well as Faber, a Minnesota native who figures to develop into a solid NHL blue liner. The 6-foot-1, 200-pound defenseman from Maple Grove was named Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year this past season and also represented the United States at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

“He’s a really, really a high-end prospect,,” said Guerin, who said Faber could probably turn pro right now and hold his own at the next level. “It’ll be a good year for him back (at the University of Minnesota) and we’ll cross that bridge at the end of the season.”

Is that a big enough return for someone of Fiala’s stature? That remains to be seen.

“I think we got fair value,” Guerin said. “I really do.”

As for some of the rumors involving the New Jersey Devils and the Ottawa Senators — both teams have top-10 draft picks next week — Guerin hinted that neither was willing to part with such hefty draft capital. Ultimately, he made what he felt was the best deal for the Wild.

Now the focus shifts to the draft in Montreal next week. With the completion of the trade on Wednesday, the Wild now have a couple of picks in the first round (No. 19 and No. 24), to go along with a handful of later-round picks.

That could go a long way for the Wild in the future as they continue to navigate the salary cap constraints that forced them to part with Fiala in the first place.

“It’s extremely important,” Guerin said. “We need younger guys. We need guys that don’t make millions and millions of dollars. We just have to do it that way.”