Joe Smith of The Athletic writes that it appears the Minnesota Wild and goaltender Filip Gustavsson will decide their contract dispute in arbitration.
Smith writes that the deal will get done but will most likely be done through an arbitrator as the sides appear unlikely to reach an agreement without the intervention.
The Wild and Gustavsson are set to go to arbitration on Aug. 4 and with Ilya Samsonov’s ruling now official and Jeremy Swayman’s case set to be heard later this week, both sides should have a clearer picture of what would be a fair contract from the club and the 25-year-old goaltender.
Gustavsson excelled in his first year in Minnesota after coming over in an off-season trade from the Ottawa Senators. It was expected that the native of Skelleftea, Sweden would backup Marc-Andre Fleury, however by the time the playoffs rolled around Gustavsson owned the Minnesota net having gone 22-9-7 with a .931 save percentage and a 2.10 goals-against average.
The Wild are dealing with a very precarious cap situation as they deal with the blowback from the Zach Parise and Ryan Suter buyouts that are eating up about $15M of Minnesota’s cap space. However, they do still have around $5M in cap space remaining to re-sign the young netminder.
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