The Minnesota Wild have signed forward Mats Zuccarello to a two-year contract extension, the club announced Friday.

The two-year pact carries an AAV of $4.125-million for the winger who is entering the final year of a five-year, $6-million AAV deal inked as a free agent in 2019.

More than a fair share of questions had been raised by the deal at the time, but Zuccarello has exceeded expectations over the life of the deal. In his 255 games over the last four seasons, he’s scored 72 goals and 218 points with each of his point totals in his last two being the highest-scoring, and second-highest-scoring years of his career.

An undrafted free agent, Zuccarello signed as a free agent with the New York Rangers in May 2010, where he spent the first eight and a half seasons of his career. Traded to the Dallas Stars in a Feb. 2019 deal, he played in two regular season games there and an additional 13 in the playoffs where he scored four goals and 11 points. That led him to his free agent deal with the Wild.

Minnesota enters this season with a mere $43,079 in cap space, according to CapFriendly, as they continue to navigate around the $14.7-million in dead cap from the Zach Parise and Ryan Suter buyouts — both of which come off the books after the 2024-25 season.

A Friday night pre-season game between the New York Rangers and New York Islanders has been postponed due to flooding and a local state of emergency.

It comes on the heels of a heavy rainfall that pounded New York City and its suburbs on Friday morning. It prompted state governor Kath Hochul to enact a state of emergency wherein she directed thousands of State personnel to address the event, while urging locals to take necessary precautions.

According to CNN, eight inches of rain fell at New York’s John F. Kennedy airport — a single-day number that hasn’t been topped since 1948. In Brooklyn alone, CNN reported a month’s worth of rain fell in three hours. Across the city, roughly three-to-six inches of rain fell, the outlet added.

In a statement, the New York Islanders said their home rink, UBS Arena, was dealing with localized flooding, and that the game would be made up on Saturday night.

Zach Laing is the Nation Network’s news director and senior columnist. He can be followed on Twitter at @zjlaing, or reached by email at zach@oilersnation.com.