Neither Minnesota Wild general manager Bill Guerin nor the camp representing star forward Kirill Kaprizov are saying much after the team’s potentially history-making first contract offer was reportedly rejected.

Speaking on the 10K Takes podcast this week, Guerin urged that Wild fans stay calm, saying he feels the team is “still in a really positive place with Kirill.”

The team would clearly like to have a deal in place before Game 1 of the regular season — Thursday, Oct. 9 in St. Louis — for multiple reasons. But if an impasse is reached, the nuclear option for Guerin and the Wild would be to explore an in-season trade and see what they can for Kaprizov rather than watch him walk away with no benefit, immediate or long-term, to the franchise.

Pittsburgh Penguins’ Bill Guerin celebrates his goal against the Philadelphia Flyers during the first period of an NHL hockey game in Pittsburgh on Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2009. The previous spring. he was traded from the New York Islanders and helped the Penguins win a Stanley Cup. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

It’s a scenario Guerin knows from first-hand experience. In March of 2009, when he was captain of the New York Islanders, Guerin was traded to the Pittsburgh Penguins and won his second career Stanley Cup there a few months later. The Islanders got what became a third-round draft pick in exchange for Guerin.

For Wild fans, one more potentially troublesome factor iis the history of moves like that one. In general, teams that acquire a star player do better in the short term than the team getting multiple role players and draft picks in exchange for one top-level asset.

The Wild are likely a long way from even considering that idea for Kaprizov, who has been the offensive leader since he joined the team for the 2020-21 season — 185 goals and 386 points in 319 games — but if he were to waive his no-movement clause and allow the Wild to shop him around, he would command considerably more than a third-round pick.

Big names in new places

Just last season, the Colorado Avalanche reached an impasse with their leading scorer, star forward Mikko Rantanen, who was in the final year of his contract with the team. Rather than see him walk away as a free agent last summer, Colorado traded Rantanen to the Carolina Hurricanes in January. In return, the Avalanche received two players and two draft picks.

Rantanen’s tenure in Raleigh was barely long enough to sell any replica sweaters. He also was unable to reach a long-term contract agreement with the Hurricanes and was traded again, to Dallas, after just 13 games in Carolina. Worse, Rantanen and the Stars wound up eliminating Colorado in Round 2 of the NHL playoffs last spring.

It was medical treatment, less than money, that prompted the Buffalo Sabres to unload their biggest star, former Hobey Baker winner Jack Eichel, to the Vegas Golden Knights in November 2021.

After being the second overall pick in the 2015 NHL Draft behind Oilers superstar Connor McDavid, Eichel had put up impressive numbers for a Sabres team that was going nowhere. After injuries cost Eichel much of the previous season, and he was at loggerheads with Buffalo management about his best path back to good health, the Sabres sent him to Vegas in exchange for two players and two high draft picks.

Buffalo remains solidly on the outside of the playoff picture, and Eichel was a key factor in the Golden Knights’ winning their first Stanley Cup in 2023.

San Jose Sharks’ Joe Thornton is pictured during an NHL hockey game against his former team the Boston Bruins on Oct. 29, 2019, in Boston. Traded to San Jose in 2005, the center later helped the Sharks reach the Stanley Cup final. (AP Photo/Winslow Townson)

Moves with mixed results

Two decades ago, star defenseman Joe Thornton forced his way out of Boston, and the Bruins traded the former first overall draft pick to San Jose for a trio of regulars — Marco Sturm, Wayne Primeau and Brad Stuart. One could argue that the trade was a win for Boston, which won a Stanley Cup six years later, while the Sharks reached the final once with Thornton but still have no NHL titles on their resume. But Sturm, Primeau and Stuart were all employed elsewhere by the spring of 2011, when the Cup last visited Boston.

Current Islanders head coach Patrick Roy has some experience with the in-season trade game. After backstopping the Montreal Canadiens’ most recent Stanley Cup win in 1993, a strained relationship with coach Mario Tremblay blew up in December 1995 when Tremblay left Roy in the net for nine Red Wings goals in an eventual 11-1 loss to Detroit.

When Roy finally left the ice, he demonstratively told team owners seated behind the home bench that he had played his final game in Montreal. Forced to move their puck-stopping mainstay, Montreal shipped Roy to Colorado, and five months later in the spring of 1996, Roy was the defensive catalyst for the first Avalanche Stanley Cup title.

There is likely still much discussion that will be had between the Wild brass and the Kaprizov camp, but if an impasse is reached, NHL history shows there are in-season trade options. They just tend to favor the team, in this equation, that would receive Kaprizov.

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By Jamie Ducharme, KFF Health News

After losing 50 pounds on the injectable weight loss medication Zepbound, Kyra Wensley received a surprising letter from her pharmacy benefit manager in April.

Her request for coverage had been denied, the letter said, because she’d had a body mass index of less than 35 when she started Zepbound. The 25-year-old who lives in New York had been taking Zepbound without incident for months, so she was confused: Why was her BMI, which had been around 32 when she started, becoming an issue only now?

Wensley had no interest in quitting an effective drug. “Going right off like that, it’s easier said than done,” she said.

Her doctor fought to keep her on the GLP-1 agonist, the category that includes weight loss and Type 2 diabetes drugs Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Zepbound. But Wensley ultimately had to switch from Zepbound to Wegovy to meet her plan’s requirements. She said she doesn’t like Wegovy as much as her old medication, but she now feels lucky to be on any GLP-1.

Kyra Wensley’s doctor fought to keep her on the injectable weight loss medication Zepbound, but Wensley ultimately had to switch to Wegovy, a different GLP-1 agonist, to meet her health plan’ s requirements. ((Lori Wensley)/KFF HEALTH/TNS)

Lots of research suggests such medications must be used indefinitely to maintain weight loss and related health benefits. But with list prices of roughly $1,000 a month, public and private payers are struggling to keep up with ballooning demand for GLP-1 weight loss drugs and in some cases are eliminating or restricting their coverage as a result.

North Carolina Medicaid plans to end GLP-1 coverage for weight loss on Oct. 1, just over a year after starting the coverage. Pennsylvania is planning to limit Medicaid coverage to beneficiaries at the highest risk of complications from obesity. And despite recent reports of a potential federal pilot program to extend coverage of GLP-1 obesity drugs under Medicaid and Medicare, all state Medicaid programs are likely to be under pressure due to steep spending cuts in the budget reconciliation package recently signed into law by President Donald Trump.

Already, many GLP-1 users quit within a year, studies suggest — often due to side effects, high costs, or insurance issues. Now a growing number of researchers, payers, and providers are exploring deliberate “deprescription,” which aims to taper some patients off their medication after they have taken it for a certain amount of time or lost a certain amount of weight.

The U.K.’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which creates guidance for the National Health Service, recommends two-year limits on the use of some weight loss medications, such as Wegovy. And the concept was raised in a recent Institute for Clinical and Economic Review report on affordable access to obesity drugs.

A. Mark Fendrick, who directs the Center for Value-Based Insurance Design at the University of Michigan, has argued that if some people using GLP-1s to lose weight were eventually transitioned off, more people could take advantage of them.

“If you’re going to spend $1 billion or $100 billion, you could either spend it on fewer people for a long period of time, or you can spend it on a lot more people for a shorter period of time,” he said.

Fendrick’s employer, the University of Michigan, indeed does that. Its prescription drug plan caps coverage of GLP-1 drugs at two years if they’re used solely for weight loss.

Jamie Bennett, a spokesperson for Wegovy and Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk, declined to comment on the concept of deprescription, noting that its drugs are intended for chronic conditions. Rachel Sorvig, a spokesperson for Zepbound and Mounjaro manufacturer Eli Lilly, said in a statement that users should “talk to their health care provider about dosage and duration needs.”

Studies have shown that people typically regain a substantial amount of weight within a year of stopping GLP-1 medications, and that many people who quit ultimately go back on the drugs.

“There’s no standard of care or gold standard on how to wean right now,” said Allison Adams, an obesity and internal medicine doctor with UK HealthCare in Kentucky.

But the math shows why time-limited coverage is appealing to payers that struggle to pay for beneficiaries’ GLP-1 prescriptions, said Michelle Gourdine, chief medical officer for the pharmacy benefit manager CVS Caremark.

And states are “between a rock and a hard place,” said Kody Kinsley, who until January led North Carolina’s Health and Human Services Department. “They’re going to have to look at every single thing and trim dollars everywhere they can.”

Pennsylvania was looking for cost-saving strategies even before the new federal tax-and-spending law, according to Brandon Cwalina, press secretary for the state’s Department of Human Services. Pennsylvania projects it will spend $1.3 billion on GLP-1 drugs this year.

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Plans could see real savings, Fendrick said, if they covered GLP-1s for initial weight loss then moved people to cheaper options — such as more affordable drugs or behavioral health programs — to maintain it.

Plenty of companies are eager to sell insurers, employers, and individuals on behavioral alternatives. One is Virta Health, which advertises its nutrition-focused weight management program as “a proven approach for deprescribing GLP-1s when clinically appropriate.” A Virta-funded study assessed 154 people with Type 2 diabetes who stopped using GLP-1 medications but continued following Virta’s program, concluding that their weight did not significantly increase after a year.

Researchers affiliated with a European weight management company also recently reported that slowly tapering off the medications may help maintain weight loss.

For employers and insurers, the “initial question” was whether to cover GLP-1s for obesity, said Virta CEO Sami Inkinen. “Now, basically, everyone’s coming to the middle and asking, ‘How do we responsibly cover these drugs?’”

Part of responsible coverage, Inkinen said, is providing other forms of support to patients who stop using GLP-1 medications, by choice or otherwise.

For some people, however, maintaining weight loss without a GLP-1 remains a challenge, even with other options available.

Lily, who lives in Michigan, lost almost 80 pounds in roughly 18 months on Wegovy. But she had to quit the drug when she turned 26 and left her parents’ insurance plan this year. The plan her employer offers stopped covering GLP-1s for weight loss right around the time she joined.

Lily, who asked to be identified by only her first name because she is not out to her family as transgender, has tried other medications since then, and previously tried lifestyle programs to control her weight. But she said nothing works as well for her as Wegovy.

She has regained 20 pounds since going off the drug at the beginning of the year and worries that number will continue to rise, potentially contributing to future health problems.

“Just give people the drugs,” she said. “It seems cheaper and safer in the long run.”

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

God help us.

On Wednesday, I watched some of the worst footage I’ve seen in my life. An assassin’s bullet cut down Charlie Kirk, one of the nation’s most prominent conservative activists and commentators, at a public event on the campus of Utah Valley University.

Kirk was a husband and the father of two small children. He was also a hero to countless conservative college students. And now he’s gone.

Kirk might have been the most successful conservative political personality in America not named Donald Trump. He helped found Turning Point USA in 2012 and built it into the most influential conservative youth organization in the United States.

And that was only one part of Kirk’s empire. He put together a vast get-out-the-vote operation for the 2024 election. He hosted a popular podcast. But to simply recite a list of his accomplishments is to understate the impact of his life and of his death.

As Emily Jashinsky, a Washington correspondent for Unherd, put it on social platform X: “Charlie Kirk is a fixture of the Gen Z social media diet. People feel like they know him. This will hit very, very close to home in ways we are not prepared for.”

That is exactly right. When an assassin shot Kirk, that person killed a man countless students felt like they knew, and the assassin killed him on a college campus. Many students will take this loss personally. Many others will now feel a sense of dread on their own campuses.

Who can feel safe? Where can they feel safe? Whatever you think of Kirk (I had many disagreements with him, and he with me), when he died he was doing exactly what we ask people to do on campus: Show up. Debate. Talk. Engage peacefully, even when emotions run high.

In fact, that’s how he made his name, in debate after debate on campus after campus.

One of the worst elements of modern political discourse is that we tend to learn about our opponents entirely through the words and actions we find offensive. We’re subjected to a constant barrage of posts that begin with words like, “Can you believe Charlie Kirk said this?” or “Did you see this nonsense?” and then point to the clips or quotes that make us the angriest.

We don’t ever see the points of agreement. We rarely see the person outside his political context. Post by post, our hearts harden until some people reach a point where they will celebrate the deaths of people they’ve grown to despise.

Just a few days ago, I watched gutting footage of Kirk’s daughter running up to hug him when he was on the set of Fox News. Kirk wasn’t just an avatar for a political point of view; he was a person whom many, many people loved. If politics prevents us from mourning a wife’s loss of a husband or two kids’ loss of a father, then we are lost.

When I speak on college campuses, I’m often asked what single thing worries me most about American politics and culture. I have an easy answer — it’s hatred. Even vast political differences can be managed when people acknowledge the humanity and dignity of their opponents. At the same time, however, small conflicts can spiral into big ones when hatred and vengeance take away our eyes and ears.

Every threat, every assault, every shooting, every murder — and certainly every political assassination — builds the momentum of hate and fear.

You can look at the history of American conflict and unrest and see the same pattern time and again. What starts as a political difference becomes a blood feud the instant someone is hurt or killed. And so each act of political violence has a double consequence. It shatters families, and — over time — it breaks nations.

Already we’re seeing calls for vengeance online. In post after post, Kirk’s grieving friends and allies are declaring that “we’re at war” and “THIS IS WAR.”

Assassination can cost us our country. We lose it when we stop seeing our opponents as human, when we crave vengeance more than peace, when the motivation for our political engagement stops being the common good of our constitutional Republic (or even just the security of our families), but is rather inflicting pain and anguish on our political enemies.

I only met Kirk once, in 2021. We were speaking at the same Christian conference, and a mutual acquaintance introduced us. We’d already had some disagreements, so I was curious about how he’d respond when we met. He was perfectly civil, even friendly and self-deprecating. We talked a bit about our families, talked through a few points of disagreement and discussed the possibility of debating our differences on campus someday.

That’s one thing I respected about Charlie — and it’s worth emphasizing because the assassin attacked him as he spoke on campus — he wasn’t afraid of a debate. He was willing to talk to anyone. And when he was shot in the middle of a debate, the assassin didn’t just take aim at a precious human being, created in the image of God, he took aim at the American experiment itself.

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I’m reminded of the famous closing words of Abraham Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address. With a national calamity looming, he ended with a plea that subtly captured the danger ahead: “I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.”

The Confederacy rejected Lincoln’s appeal, but our generation faces its own choice. We have to work through our deep divide, recover our decency. The ballot box exists. Free speech exists. The gun cannot rule the day.

David French writes a column for the New York Times.

Dear President Trump,

I am writing this as I ride through the night on a train from the Poland-Ukraine border to Kyiv, Ukraine. I should be thinking about the Ukraine war, but I am thinking about you and why the aftermath of the awful murder of Charlie Kirk may be the most important turning point in your presidency — depending on how you turn.

Let me put this bluntly: You are not going to win the Nobel Peace Prize, which you so covet, by mediating between Ukrainians and Vladimir Putin or in the Gaza Strip between Israelis and Palestinians. Neither of these conflicts is ripe for a solution right now. But you have a chance to win something much more significant and historic:

The American peace prize.

Make peace at home. Make peace among Americans. That is the peace prize that you don’t have to wait for anyone to confer on you. It is there for your making and the taking. This American peace prize will not be awarded by Scandinavians. It will be awarded by history. It will say that when Americans came closer to civil war than perhaps any other time since the Civil War, President Donald Trump surprised everyone on the upside: He called Barack and Michelle Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George and Laura Bush, the Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate and House and all nine Supreme Court justices and said, “Come to the White House, and let the country see us standing together against political violence and vowing that we will model civil discourse and disagreement — in our speeches and online — and we will call out the opposite when we see it among our supporters as well our rivals.”

Getting through the next week is important, Mr. President. The challenge is starting today to try to make peace and then to keep going.

Even on this train to Kyiv, I can hear the voices in America saying, “Donald Trump will never, ever do that. It is not in his character. He has never surprised us on the upside.”

“Just the opposite. On Wednesday, he said that he plans to unleash the full weight of his administration against those who contributed to an environment of ‘radical left political violence.’ On Friday, he said more of the same.”

Mr. President, if you treat the cancer of political extremism eating away at the soul of our country as coming only from the far left and not also the far right, you will destroy your legacy, and you will destroy the country.

After the signing of the Abraham Accords, you called me and told me that I surprised you — that you thought The New York Times would never let me write such a supportive column for your Middle East peace breakthrough. Well, I am begging you now, Mr. President: Surprise me. Surprise all of us and make peace in America. Nothing, absolutely nothing, would isolate the extremes on the left and the right more than if you did that. And nothing would be better for the country than to attempt to calm and unify people.

As unrealistic as it may sound, I refuse to foreclose the possibility that you will elevate the country, not just divide it even more — because the stakes are so high.

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Do not kid yourself: If you go after only the far-left voices, you will be ignoring what I consider to be Abraham Lincoln’s best piece of advice to all of his successors, delivered in his address before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois:

“At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? … I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.”

Thomas Friedman writes a column for the New York Times.