The trade
Kings get: Left winger Kevin Fiala.
Wild get: A first-round pick in 2022 and prospect Brock Faber.
The grades
Corey Pronman: Brock Faber has been an excellent player in college, being a top defenseman in his conference this season. He was highly impressive for a teenager for Team USA at the Olympics and as part of their gold-medal run at the previous world juniors. Faber is an excellent skater who plays hard and projects to be a quality defender in the NHL despite not having great size. The offense in his game doesn’t stand out, but he moves the puck well enough on his first passes. He projects as a quality top-four defenseman in the NHL who can take tough defensive minutes but may not put up many points.
Kevin Fiala had a career year posting a point per game and being a leading player on a top offensive team in the NHL. Fiala is an extremely skilled winger who can beat NHL defensemen 1v1 with consistency and make difficult plays with the puck. He can be dangerous as a set up man or a finisher. He’s a very strong skater, not a burner for an undersized guy, but his skating is an NHL asset. He also added penalty-killing duties to his game this season. I have some reservations that he’s a point/game type of player going forward, but he’s a legit top-of-the-lineup winger for the Kings.
The Kings have a deep farm system so I like them leveraging it to acquire a great player, even though losing Faber may sting as he’s developed into a true premium NHL defense prospect after being a second-round pick in 2020. The price on the extension of seven years at $7.875 million AAV for Fiala is pricy as a restricted free agent who doesn’t play a premium position, so they are risking he stays excellent for a while. This is a move that teams do to go from rebuilding to legitimate and I respect the Kings seeing a window opening especially given their division doesn’t look that deep.
The Wild are a worse team now than they were yesterday, but they got significant young assets they can pay entry-level deals to and weren’t going to pay Fiala what he wanted. I like this trade for both teams.
Kings: B+
Wild: B+
According to sources, the #mnwild have traded the rights to pending restricted free agent Kevin Fiala to the #lakings for their 2022 first-round pick and University of Minnesota captain Brock Faber
— Michael Russo (@RussoHockey) June 29, 2022
Dom Luszczyszyn: I can’t say I know much about Brock Faber, but if Corey Pronman projects him to be a top-four defender (and not more), this return feels light for a legitimate top-line player that just scored 85 points last season.
Granted, the Wild didn’t have much of any leverage here. Getting a top prospect plus a first-round pick is decent given the circumstances, it’s just a shame it even got to this point. That the Wild were forced to accept a return that very likely won’t come close to equalling Kevin Fiala’s value is obviously not ideal.
Fiala has been a standout since joining the Wild and broke out in a big way, especially in 2021-22. He’s blossomed into an incredibly productive player and though he has some defensive warts, he makes up for it with his dynamic offensive ability. He’s one of the league’s best players at carrying the puck up ice and is excellent at creating chances in the offensive zone.
That’s the exact type of player the Kings need to push the team from “good” to “great.” Fiala has the capability to do that as a winger projected to be worth roughly three wins of value and immediately becomes the team’s most productive forward. Finishing ability is something the Kings were in desperate need of and Fiala addresses that issue plenty.
While the return is modest for the Wild, it’s not much of anything for the Kings who have a very deep prospect pool that they can now leverage for real NHL talent. I’m always wary of trades centered around prospects because there’s still a big chance they don’t pan out as expected. We know what Fiala is and that’s a game-breaking, point-per-game winger. Those types of players don’t come around very often and the Kings made out well in acquiring such a player, in his prime, for a cost that wasn’t very steep.
The Wild did what they could, but this is a slam dunk for Los Angeles.
Kings: A
Wild: B
Sean Gentille: I like what both teams did here, actually. Way to go, everybody.
We’ve been waiting for some kind of all-in(ish) move from the Kings for a bit now. Jack Eichel was always a pipe dream, and there was no reason to pay deadline prices on a team that — fun as it was to watch, and despite all the fits they gave the Oilers — wasn’t quite worth the investment.
The thing about that seven-game series vs. Edmonton, though, is that the Kings showed that they were … kind of worth it. They’ve got something nice in the oven, and adding a player like Fiala — a productive, talented, top-end player who immediately signed a seven-year, $7.875 million extension — was the next logical step, especially in a scenario where he didn’t cost the Kings, say, Quinton Byfield.
And hey, he didn’t. Now, the Kings are an even more interesting mix of in-their-prime guys like Fiala, Phillip Danault and Adrian Kempe, slightly past-it/still productive stars like Anze Kopitar and Drew Doughty and a solid group of up-and-comers like Byfield and Sean Durzi. I’m not sure I’d pick them to win the Pacific Division, but they’re going to be a lot of fun.
Fiala, meanwhile, made all the sense in the world for Los Angeles. If you’re a little hesitant at the contract-year numbers he put up, I don’t blame you — but still, this is a 25-year-old coming off an 85-point season, with the sort of elite finishing ability the Kings clearly lacked. Guys like that don’t grow on trees, and they don’t often hit the market. Minnesota’s situation was uncommon, and some team was going to reap the benefit.
That being said, I like what Bill Guerin did here. Faber is a highly regarded player with Minnesota roots (not that the latter matters all that much), and first-round picks are always nice to have … especially when you’ve drafted as well as the Wild have over the last few years. Plus Faber is cheap, and that’s vital for a team about to enter the cap hinterlands. The Wild didn’t have a ton of leverage, and keeping Fiala certainly would’ve been preferable to sending him to California, but they still got a solid haul.
Kings: A
Wild: B+
(Photo: Bruce Kluckhohn / NHLI via Getty Images)
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