from Sarah McLellan of the Star Tribune,

At the time of negotiations, there was no stipulation in the collective bargaining agreement that limited the length of contracts. But after the league rejected a whopping 17-year, $102 million deal between Ilya Kovalchuk and the Devils in 2010, the NHL and NHL Players Association agreed that the cap hit for any contract longer than five years would be recalculated once a player turned 41 during that deal.

That influenced Suter and Parise, essentially capping them at a 13-year commitment since they’d each be 40 years old in the final season of those contracts.

“There’s a lot of variables that can happen in 13 years,” Wild owner Craig Leipold said. “But that was the risk we were willing to take in order to get those two players.”...

“We also felt that a provision implementing term limits on contracts was a reasonable and responsible ‘allocation tool’ within the overall Cap system,” NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly wrote in an email, “which hopefully would operate to better ensure that the overall pool of dollars available for Player compensation in any given year was being distributed in a fair and equitable way."

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The cap hit for each is a little over $7.5M through the 2024-25 season.