The Wild announced they’ve activated winger Mats Zuccarello from injured reserve. The top-six fixture will make his season debut in a couple of hours against the Islanders. They’ve been operating with an open roster spot for quite some time, so no corresponding move is required.
Minnesota didn’t hold a morning skate before today’s game. That’s to be expected on the second half of a back-to-back with travel – they lost to the Hurricanes 4-3 in Carolina last night. As such, it’s unclear where Zuccarello will slot into the lineup, but it’s assumed he’ll reprise his familiar role on the top line with Kirill Kaprizov and Marco Rossi.
Zuccarello had a lower-body issue pop up in the closing weeks of the offseason and wasn’t cleared to participate at the beginning of training camp. The initial expectation was that he’d miss the start of the regular season, and that was confirmed when the Wild said in late September that he’d be out for a minimum of seven to eight weeks. That makes his recent progress and today’s activation around a week and a half ahead of schedule.
His return is of special note for a Wild club that’s been looking to add an impact scoring winger on the trade market. They’re off to a sluggish 5-7-3 start, due mostly to uncharacteristically poor defensive play. They’re bottom-five in the league or close to it in most metrics – 29th in goals against per game (3.67), 29th in penalty killing (68.8%), 26th in shots against per game (30.1), and 29th in expected goals against per game at 5-on-5 (2.47).
Zuccarello won’t have much of an impact there, but the Wild are hoping he can at least help them outscore their problems. Fellow aging veteran Marcus Johansson stepped into Zuccarello’s top-line home to start the year and performed admirably, rattling off six goals and seven assists for 13 points in 15 games. The Wild hope he can keep some semblance of that momentum up as he shifts down into a second-line job with Matt Boldy and Joel Eriksson Ek – the former of whom is clicking at a point per game – to boost the depth output from their middle-six.
Now in his age-38 season, expectations for Zuccarello should start to be tempered. He’s still been a minutes-muncher for the Wild as he ages, averaging 19:39 per game last year, but he can’t keep that workload up forever. His 0.78 points per game last season were his lowest since 2019-20 and a 14% dropoff from the year prior. If that decline ends up being linear and Zuccarello only operates at around a 55-point pace this year, Minnesota’s search for another top-nine piece will only intensify.