Matt Boldy already proved he can live in the neighborhood of the league’s best. Now comes the harder part: staying there.
His 2025-26 season put him squarely in elite company. Boldy finished with 42 goals and 43 assists, a line that nearly tracked with Kirill Kaprizov’s 45 goals and 44 assists.
He tied for ninth in goals and finished 19th in points, then added some big moments at the Olympics. That kind of year pushed him from 19th on NHL Network’s list of top wingers in 2025 all the way up to sixth in 2026.
The names ahead of him tell the story. Nikita Kucherov, David Pastrnak, Kaprizov, Mikko Rantanen, and Mitch Marner sit from first through fifth.
Four of those five have made the 40/40 Club again and again; as a group, they’ve done it 13 times. Boldy has done it once.
That’s the difference between a breakout and a standard. Jamie Benn, Matt Duchene, Eric Staal, and Thomas Vanek are all part of the 52-player 40/40 Club in the Salary Cap Era, and each reached it only once.
Martin St. Louis and Marián Hossa also had one 40/40 season and ended up in the Hall.
Dany Heatley, meanwhile, hit the mark four times, including two 50/50 seasons, and still waits for his Hall call. The point is simple: the greats are usually the ones who keep showing up at that level.
Boldy’s 2025-26 season looked like proof of concept. He showed the full package: his shot, his hands, his passing touch, and the ability to use his 6-foot-2 frame like a power forward. The question now is whether that becomes his normal.
He helped create his own success last season, too. His 16.5% shooting rate was a career high, but he also piled up volume.
Boldy was one of 16 forwards with at least 500 shot attempts, and his 252 shots on goal put him among just six players with 500-plus attempts to have more than half of those attempts reach the net. Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon, Jason Robertson, Macklin Celebrini, and Cutter Gauthier were the others, and all of them scored at least 40 goals.
The setup around Boldy still looks strong. The power play will continue to run through him, Kaprizov, and Quinn Hughes, and the Wild’s man advantage was a top-three unit in the NHL after Hughes arrived. At five-on-five, Boldy is projected to skate with Joel Eriksson Ek and Blake Coleman, a line that should give Minnesota its most dependable group at both ends of the ice.
Health is the obvious variable, especially with the league moving to an 84-game season and adding two more games to the grind. The other piece is whether Boldy keeps embracing the power-forward style that made last season work so well.
There’s plenty of incentive. In the last 18 months, he’s watched Rantanen and Marner take “discounts” to land at $12.5 million per year.
He’s seen Kaprizov get $17 million per season. Kucherov is in the final year of his deal and, even at 34 when he reaches UFA status, is expected to get paid.
Boldy isn’t in a contract year, but the clock is still ticking. He can sign his next deal in three summers and reach UFA in four.
If he stacks another 40/40 season, and then another, he’ll be lining himself up for a massive payday at age 29. At that point, he could be in position to command anything he wants.
That’s the path to the kind of contract that makes Kaprizov’s look tame. But it starts with the same thing that lifted Boldy into the conversation in the first place: turning one huge season into a habit.
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