Minnesota Wild forward Kirill Kaprizov now stands alone in his team’s franchise record books after scoring an empty netter in his team’s 5-1 win over Tampa Bay.
With the marker, Kaprizov notched his 220th career goal with Minnesota, passing Marian Gaborik for the most in Wild history.
“It’s good, you know, but you always want it more and just don’t think about this too much,” Kaprizov said. “It feels good because everyone shake and congrats and stuff like that, but now it’s done and just need to keep going.”
Brock Faber got the scoring started at 3:46 of the first period, firing a one timer over Andrei Vasilevskiy’s glove. Mats Zuccarello kept things going in the second frame on the power play to put the Wild up 2-0 before Nikita Kucherov cut the deficit in half not long afterwards.
Unfortunately for Tampa Bay, that would be all the offence they could muster on Tuesday night, as Yakov Trenin, Quinn Hughes, and Kaprizov would pour it on down the stretch to balloon the Minnesota lead.
“What can you do? It’s tough. You come into the locker room after two periods, you’re down 3-1 and you think the wrong team is up 3-1,” Tampa Bay coach Jon Cooper said after the game. “I didn’t mind the way we played. We gave them some gifts. When you’re going to give a good team like that some freebies, it hurts your chances. But we got our looks.”
With the goal, Kaprizov extended his point streak to 8 games (7G, 4A), giving the 28 year old 75 points (35G, 40A) on the season. The dynamic winger is in the final year of his current deal which carries an average annual value of $9M. Next season, his record setting 8 year, $136M extension ($17M AAV) is set to kick in, which will be an interesting financial hurdle for the Wild to attempt to navigate.
Minnesota is off for the next few days before heading out west to take on the Golden Knights on Friday. The wild sport a 36-16-10 record (82 points) and occupy the 3rd spot in the Central Division following Tuesday night’s contests.
Photo: Jenn G. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.