- Bill Guerin says he’s confident in a Quinn Hughes extension but admits the Wild “can’t make him sign anything”
- Guerin says Cale Makar’s record deal set a bar, though Hughes “might be after different things”
- Read below for Guerin’s full comments and where Minnesota’s plan sits with camp weeks away
Bill Guerin is not pretending he controls this one.
The Wild general manager worked the Minnesota State Fair media circuit on Monday and was asked how the team plans around Quinn Hughes without a contract in hand. “We can plan, we can look down the road, we can plan on what we want but then he’s gotta come back, too and tell us what he wants,” Guerin said on Judd’s Hockey Show on SKOR North, per NHL.com. “We can’t make him sign anything.”
He kept going, too. “We’d love to have him for as long as we can get him, if he’s got something different in his mind he wants to do, there goes our plan.”
Guerin covered the same ground with Dan Barreiro on KFAN:
None of it came with an alarm attached. Guerin said he speaks with Hughes and agent Pat Brisson constantly, and that the communication has been good all summer.
“I’m confident. That’s the luxury I have of being on the inside,” Guerin said.
Hughes has been eligible to sign since July 1. One season remains on the six-year, $47.1 million deal he signed in Vancouver, and unrestricted free agency is waiting next summer.
Guerin was also asked on the Chad Hartman Show whether Cale Makar’s record extension changed what a Hughes deal looks like.
“There’s a bar with Cale Makar signing that contract in Colorado, but Quinn might be after different things,” Guerin said, via Nick Kieser of Yahoo Sports. “He’s a different guy. He has a different personality and has different things in his life that are important to him. Who knows what he’s really going to want in the end.”
That bar is not abstract, and it raised Minnesota’s bill the moment it landed:
Makar’s eight-year, $163.2 million deal now tops the largest contracts in NHL history. Sitting directly beneath it is Kirill Kaprizov at eight years and $136 million, and Guerin is the man who negotiated that one last September.
That summer is exactly where he pointed when asked why nobody should panic yet.
“A year ago today the same questions were being asked about Kirill and I just tried to talk people off the ledge,” Guerin said. “These things take time.”
Hughes finished last season with 76 points, 53 of them in 48 games after the December blockbuster that sent him to Minnesota. He added 15 more in 11 playoff games while the Wild won a postseason series for the first time in more than a decade.
Minnesota opens preseason play in roughly three weeks, and Guerin still does not have Hughes signed.
