Apparently KK does is not willing to sell out any of his UFA years. If the Wild and BG knuckle under to a 3 year 9 mill plus contract any and all future negotiations are going to be a real pain for them. Personally I feel a 9 mill aav for any player with 55 NHL games is overpaying and risky.
I don’t know and neither does anyone else what his performance level will be once he’s been around the league for one or two full seasons and opposing teams adjust to him. Vegas sure figured out how to corral him once the playoffs started. He scored six goals on them during the regular season. Once in the playoffs he scored one goal and one assist iirc. So maybe Vegas felt shut KK down you shut the Wild down. If that’s the case it worked but I don’t recall seeing KK being smothered more than anyone else. The difference in that series was Fluery. I recall Fiala having more and better scoring chances than KK.
Maybe KK doesn’t want to be “the guy” on a otherwise mediocre team who knows? But I have said from the start and still feel 55 games against 7 other teams and four of those among the worse the NHL has to offer is a awful small sample size to anoint him the next coming of Gretzky. He still needs to prove it to me.