If you’ve ever seen all of your friends head to a concert while you stay home because you couldn’t afford tickets, you have a general idea of what Bill Guerin has endured over the past half-dozen years.

For the Minnesota Wild general manager, those frustrating fiscal shackles come off on July 1.

Meeting with reporters on Tuesday, Guerin said that with most of the salary cap money expended on the contracts for Zach Parise and Ryan Suter finally gone, he looks forward to being able to provide more talent and more depth for Wild fans once free agency opens.

“You know me, now. I like to be aggressive,” said Guerin, who recently completed his sixth season as the Minnesota general manager. “I don’t want to sit on my hands at all. I’m kind of tired of doing that.”

Guerin said he feels the Wild are pretty well stocked on defense and in goal, but forwards will be the focus when free agency opens.

“Probably more at the center position. I think (Joel Eriksson Ek) needs a little help,” Guerin said of the Wild’s top center. “He’s in a battle every single night, and there’s no easy night for him. So I think if we could create some help there. I wouldn’t be opposed to a scoring winger, either.”

Of course, the scoring winger that most Wild fans are focused on already plays in Minnesota, and Guerin said there is confidence that a long-term contract extension for superstar Kirill Kaprizov will be checked off his summer to do list, as well.

“My expectations are to get him signed. That’s it,” he said. “I’d like to get it done as soon as I can. Obviously, everybody knows how important Kirill is to the team, to the organization, to the market. He’s a star player, so yeah, that’s priority number one.”

Kaprizov missed exactly half of the Wild’s regular-season games in 2024-25 while dealing with a lower body injury that required a midseason surgery. He still finished third on the team offensively, and he was a catalyst in the playoffs.

The focus on wrapping up Kaprizov before he potentially hits the free agent market on July 1, 2026, was one of the main missions of Wild owner Craig Leipold before the most recent season even started. In a preseason meeting with reporters in September 2024, Leipold promised that no team in the NHL would offer Kaprizov more money or years than Minnesota is prepared to do. Guerin agreed on Tuesday.

“Nobody can offer him more than we can,” Guerin said. “What Craig said is right. It’s true. I’ll just say I’m very confident that we’re going to get a deal done with Kirill. I think he really loves this market and this team. I think he feels we’re going in the right direction.”

The direction the team was headed this season was vastly different in the 41 games Kaprizov played, when they started the season atop the NHL standings roughly two months in and the 28-year-old Russian was legitimately in the conversation for league Most Valuable Player.

When he was sidelined, the Wild went from a sure thing for the playoffs to needing an Eriksson Ek goal with 20.9 seconds left in the final regular-season game just to qualify for the postseason.

Guerin noted that the lack of depth, caused in part by the team’s inability to spend money on players over the past few years due to the salary cap constraints, was at least part of the issue this season, and in previous seasons when key players have gotten hurt.

“People say that, ‘They’re injured all the time.’ Well, then maybe we’ll have the guys stop blocking shots, or training as hard as they do,” Guerin said with an obvious note of sarcasm. “I just think it’s been bad luck. This is a hard, fast game. You get injured. I think it’s more impactful, though, because we haven’t had the depth that hopefully we’re gonna create here, coming up.”

According to the numbers-crunching website Puckpedia.com, the Wild’s $15.39 million in dead salary cap space last season was second-most in the NHL, trailing only the $15.94 million in Philadelphia.