"Doug Risebrough thought he could sign Marian Gaborik before the regular season starts next Saturday. That's not going to happen, the Wild general manager said, and the next steps are uncertain.

"We're going to have to wait and see for the next little bit," Risebrough said Saturday from Montreal, where the Wild were scheduled to play their final exhibition against the Canadiens.

Gaborik, the franchise's top scorer and first draft pick, is scheduled to become an unrestricted free agent in July. While the sides appeared to make some progress early, negotiations have hit what Gaborik's agent, Ron Salcer, on Saturday called "an impasse," and there are no current plans to meet again.

The "artificial timetable" of the Oct. 11 season opener against Boston, Risebrough said, came out of early talks.

"I was thinking in the context of what both sides were saying," he said, "and that we thought it would be better for both of us not to be answering these questions during the season, because we both know we're going to be answering them all the time."

Indeed, though the Wild are trying to matriculate several new and key players into coach Jacques Lemaire's system, Gaborik's contract status has overshadowed everything else in camp.

The Wild have acknowledged that if they can't sign Gaborik, they will be forced to explore his trade value. Risebrough declined to say whether that's currently being done, or when the team might finally feel a trade is inevitable.

"I'm not answering that right now because I'm not in that mindset," he said.

Gaborik is in the final season of a three-year extension worth $6.33 million a year, with a salary of $7.5 million this season. The sides appeared set on a long-term deal, but the overall value of the contract was in dispute.

The league's highest-paid players, on average salary, are Washington's Alex Ovechkin ($9.5 million) and Pittsburgh's Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin ($8.7 million each). Ovechkin and Crosby have won Hart Trophies, and Malkin was last season's runner-up.

The Wild are willing to offer Gaborik a raise but hesitant to pay him, over the entire length of a contract, what those players average annually. This seems to be where negotiations have gotten tricky, because there are two ways to look at the value of a contract — per year, and total value.

Ovechkin tops both lists at $9.5 million a year for 13 seasons, totaling $124 million. But next is Tampa Bay's Vincent Lecavalier, whose deal is worth $85 million total, but $7.7 million annually because of front-loading — $10 million a year for the first seven years of the 11-year deal.

Risebrough said at the start of training camp that total value is the main sticking point, and that once that is agreed to, term and average salary would fall into place. Salcer would neither agree nor disagree.

"I don't want to go into the dynamics of the negotiations," he said. "We are where we are; I don't think the channels of communication have been shut off by any means." "