{"id":615231,"date":"2026-07-05T10:09:45","date_gmt":"2026-07-05T10:09:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/615231\/"},"modified":"2026-07-05T10:09:45","modified_gmt":"2026-07-05T10:09:45","slug":"minnesota-wild-sign-max-shabanov-pro-hockey-rumors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/615231\/","title":{"rendered":"Minnesota Wild Sign Max Shabanov \u2013 Pro Hockey Rumors"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to a team announcement<\/a>, the Minnesota Wild have signed forward Max Shabanov<\/a> to a one-year, $1.6MM contract for the 2026-27 season. Shabanov became an unrestricted free agent yesterday after the New York Islanders chose not to tender him a qualifying offer.<\/p>\n

Shabanov, 25, joins the Wild after finishing his rookie season with the Islanders. Primarily playing in New York\u2019s middle six, Shabanov finished with five goals and 18 points in 44 games with a -5 rating, averaging 13:41 of ice time per game.<\/p>\n

The risk of signing Shabanov is the injury concern. He dealt with multiple different multi-game injuries, causing him to miss nearly half of the year with the Islanders. Still, given his relatively low salary, it\u2019s not a very large gamble by Minnesota.<\/p>\n

If he can stay healthy, there is some upside to Shabanov\u2019s game. He\u2019s still relatively young and is coming off an impressive stretch in Russia. Throughout the 2023-24 and 2024-25 seasons, playing for the KHL\u2019s Traktor Chelyabinsk, Shabanov scored 48 goals and 117 points in 129 games. That kind of offense isn\u2019t common for players in their mid-20s.<\/p>\n

Unless more salary is moved out, Shabanov\u2019s signing is likely one of the last moves the Wild will make in their quiet offseason. After acquiring<\/a> Blake Coleman<\/a> and Olli M\u00e4\u00e4tt\u00e4<\/a> from the Calgary Flames this morning, Minnesota will have roughly $795K in salary cap space after registering Shabanov\u2019s contract.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"According to a team announcement, the Minnesota Wild have signed forward Max Shabanov to a one-year, $1.6MM contract…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":615232,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5118],"tags":[5,35971,161,38,5280,4,405,162],"class_list":["post-615231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-minnesota-wild","tag-hockey","tag-max-shabanov","tag-minnesota","tag-minnesota-wild","tag-minnesotawild","tag-nhl","tag-transactions","tag-wild"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116866827159773964","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=615231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615231\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/615232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=615231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=615231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=615231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}