Deadline Primer: Minnesota Wild
With the trade deadline now just a week away, we continue to take a closer look at each team. Where do they stand, what do they need to do, and what assets do they have to fill those needs?
After slipping into the playoffs last year with less than 90 points and the final wildcard position, only to get punched in the mouth by the Dallas Stars and go home early, the Minnesota Wild needed a change. They’d fired their coach halfway through the season, and were relying on an aging (but excellent) core of Mikko Koivu, Zach Parise and Ryan Suter too much to succeed.
Enter Bruce Boudreau and the kids. After good solid seasons from the young guns a year ago, many of them have exploded to the forefront of the team this season, with Mikael Granlund, Nino Niederreiter, Charlie Coyle, and Jason Zucker all already setting career-highs in points through 59 games. They’re leading the Western Conference by five points and look poised for a deep playoff run.
Record
39-14-6, 1st in Central Division
Deadline Status
Buyer
Deadline Cap Space
$5.20MM – full-season cap hit, 47/50 contracts per CapFriendly.
Draft Picks
2017: MIN 1st, MIN 3rd, MIN 4th, MIN 5th, MIN 6th, MIN 7th
2018: MIN 1st, MIN 2nd, MIN 3rd, MIN 4th, MIN 5th, MIN 6th, MIN 7th
Trade Chips
Minnesota will almost surely avoid trading anything off the roster that has put them in prime position for a Stanley Cup run, meaning they’ll have to use draft picks and prospects as bait if they want to add anything next week. It’s a shame they don’t have their second-round pick from this season—which they traded to Buffalo for Chris Stewart back in 2015—since they are used so often in rental deals. 
The Wild do however have a fairly stocked cupboard of prospects that could be waived in front of a team looking to get younger. Their drafting the last decade (or longer) though not perfect in the first round has unearthed plenty of talent in later selections. They’ve picked players like Cal Clutterbuck (3rd), Justin Falk (4th), Marco Scandella (2nd), Erik Haula (7th), Darcy Kuemper (6th), Zucker (2nd) and Johan Larsson (2nd) all outside of the first round and found excellent value in each.
If a team really wants to go after youth, they could ask for prospects like Jordan Greenway, who showed off his skills at the most recent World Juniors. Kirill Kaprisov is tearing up the KHL as a 19-year old, and it was recently reported that he’ll play for CSKA next season. Alex Tuch is showing his ability at the AHL level after a dominating NCAA career, and Luke Kunin continues to captain the University of Wisconsin up the college hockey rankings. It would be crazy to trade any of these names for a rental, but if the Wild want to enter the ring of possible long-term upgrades, they have the pieces to do it.
One Player To Watch: F Jason Pominville, who has a big cap-hit and is playing much less due to the emergence of the young guns is a contract that the Wild may look to move out if they’re to make any improvements.
Team Needs
1) Wing Depth – The Wild would like to move Coyle back to center ice if possible, but they’d need a winger who can jump into their top-six to do it. Jannik Hansen has been rumored to be on their radar, but a player like Patrick Eaves seems a better fit. It’s not guaranteed that they’ll do anything, though GM Chuck Fletcher has said that they have some “unproven depth” at forward.
2) Center – The nice thing about having Coyle is that if you can’t find the upgrade at the wing you could always acquire a center instead and leave him out there. Arizona’s Martin Hanzal was quoted today by Chris Hine of the Chicago Tribune as saying he wants to stay in the middle even if traded, which would still be possible for the Wild.
Minor Transactions: 2/9/2017
For the third consecutive day no players were placed on waivers, as Chris Johnston of Sportsnet noted this afternoon. However, that doesn’t mean teams aren’t busy calling players up from or sending players to the minor leagues. In this post we’ll track the day’s minor transactions and update as needed.
- The Buffalo Sabres have announced (via Twitter) that they have recalled forwards Evan Rodrigues and Derek Grant from Rochester. Bill Hoppe of the Times Herald added that Zemgus Girgensons wasn’t on the ice for the team’s morning skate and while Evander Kane was, he didn’t take line rushes. The implication being both players might be unavailable tonight thus necessitating the call-ups. Rodrigues has appeared in two games this season, going scoreless while averaging 11:28 of ice time. Grant, who was recently reacquired via waivers from Nashville, has registered four points, all assists, in 41 games. He is still searching for his first NHL goal after seeing action in 81 games over parts of five seasons with Ottawa, Calgary, Buffalo and Nashville.
- Winger Alex Tuch has been reassigned by the Minnesota Wild to their AHL affiliate in Iowa, the team announced this morning. Tuch, the club’s first-round pick, 18th overall, in the 2014 draft, has appeared in three games this season without netting a point. He’s registered 11 goals and 22 points in 34 AHL contests. Michael Russo of the Star Tribune tweeted that unless the team recalls another forward from the minor then it appears as if Charlie Coyle will move back to the wing with Erik Haula and Tyler Graovac assuming the third and fourth line center slots, respectively.
- Joe Smith of the Tampa Bay Times brings word that the Tampa Bay Lightning have reassigned forwards Michael Bournival and Joel Vermin to Syracuse. Smith adds that this could be good news for Ondrej Palat and Alex Killorn, as the reassignments leave the team with just 12 healthy forwards – Ryan Callahan is currently on IR. Palat has missed the last two games while Killorn didn’t play in Tampa’s 5 – 0 shutout win over the L.A. Kings.
Central Division Snapshots: Preds, Wild, Fabbri
Nashville Predators GM David Poile is no stranger to making major trades. In the last 13 months alone, the veteran executive has completed two blockbuster one-for-one swaps, first acquiring center Ryan Johansen for defenseman Seth Jones then dealing longtime team captain Shea Weber to Montreal for fellow blue liner P.K. Subban. This propensity for making big moves leads Adam Vingan of The Tennessean to wonder whether Nashville will make another headline deal before the trade deadline.
Poile already picked up veteran fourth-line center Vernon Fiddler in a deal from New Jersey and the team has been linked to Colorado center Matt Duchene. But while the Predators could use more offensive flair at the pivot position, Poile is hesitant to sacrifice the one asset just about everyone else wants from him at this point: young defensemen. Poile already sacrificed Jones, who is enjoying a breakout campaign with Columbus, doesn’t seem interested in depleting his defense corps further: “We can’t be doing that all the time, or you won’t have one of the best defenses.” As Vingan notes, Poile will be listening but major trades are tough to pull off in-season so any moves the Preds do make are likely to be similar to the recent acquisitions of Fiddler and Cody McLeod.
Elsewhere in the Central Division:
- As it stands, the Minnesota Wild are in a comfortable spot in the division, holding a four-point lead over second place Chicago and 15 points ahead of third-place Nashville. Barring an epic collapse, the team is virtually assured of hosting at least a first-round playoff series. As Michael Russo of the Star Tribune writes, this cushion will allow Wild bench boss Bruce Boudreau to experiment with his forward lines and defense pairs in order to help GM Chuck Fletcher better identify what the team’s needs are ahead of the deadline. For instance, Boudreau will slot Charlie Coyle, who has spent much of the season riding shotgun on Eric Staal‘s line, at center for tonight’s game against Winnipeg with Alex Tuch moving into the lineup at wing. He’ll also have room to give Mike Reilly and Gustav Olofsson more playing time and if they perform well, it may give Fletcher the confidence needed to move one of the team’s top blue liners in a deal to both save cap space and to acquire help at other positions.
- According to Jeremy Rutherford of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the St. Louis Blues will for the time being look to internal options to replace Robby Fabbri, who the team just learned will miss the rest of the season with an ACL injury. In the wake of the injury, the team recalled forwards Kenny Agostino, who tallied just the second goal of his NHL career and the first in almost three years yesterday, and Magnus Paajarvi from Chicago of the AHL. The team will have three-plus weeks to figure out whether those two can adequately fill in before investigating the options available on the trade market. Regardless of how the ultimately choose to do so, replacing Fabbri won’t be easy. While he’s had an up-and-down season in 2016-17, the 21-year-old winger is an extremely skilled player and a key part of the team’s top-nine forward group.
Central Division Snapshots: Lehtera, Parise, Avalanche
In his latest chat feature appearing in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jeremy Rutherford tackles an array of reader questions yesterday. A popular topic for Blues fans are the ongoing struggles of center Jori Lehtera, who St. Louis made a healthy scratch for this evening’s game against Winnipeg.
Lehtera posted a strong rookie campaign in 2014-15, finishing with 14 goals and 44 points in 75 games. He followed that up with a 34-point campaign last season, a noticeable drop off in output but still enough to convince the Blues to ink the 28-year-old Finnish pivot to a three-year deal with an AAV of $4.7MM. As Rutherford noted, the Blues might have been better off waiting another year to prove himself but the team decided to get that deal done so as to allow themselves to focus on re-signing David Backes and Jaden Schwartz. With just seven points in 20 games this season it’s looking like that extension may have indeed been premature.
Rutherford also believes it’s more likely now that the team will leave Lehtera unprotected and available to be taken by the Vegas Golden Knights in next June’s expansion draft. He projects the Blues will choose to protect 10 skaters – seven forwards and three blue liners – but has Lehtera and Ty Rattie as two the team will leave unprotected.
Elsewhere in the Central Division:
- Mike Russo of the Star Tribune reports that Zach Parise is indeed healthy, according to the team’s bench boss, Bruce Boudreau. There was concern after the veteran winger blocked a shot in the first period of Minnesota’s recent loss to Calgary. Boudreau described Parise’s skating as “sluggish” and “methodical,” in post-game remarks, which led to the questions pertaining to Parise’s health status. The long-time NHL coach did sit down with Parise along with winger Charlie Coyle, and plans to do the same with center Eric Staal to discuss the line’s recent struggles. As Russo notes, the line is pointless in its last two contests and the trio combined for just two even-strength shots in the Calgary game.
- Lastly, Colorado GM Joe Sakic is sticking by the team’s core group despite a rough start to the 2016-17 campaign, writes Terry Frei of The Denver Post. The Avalanche are currently tied with Arizona for last place in the Western Conference and are seven points out of a playoff berth. With their season on the verge of slipping away, Sakic still expresses faith in his core – Matt Duchene, Gabriel Landeskog, Semyon Varlamov, Tyson Barrie, Erik Johnson and Nathan MacKinnon – and feels the team needs to play with more urgency in order to get their season back on track: “I have faith in them. But to me, the start is not a core thing; it’s a team thing. I think you see we’re trying to hold people accountable. We know we have certain guys who can give more, and those guys know they can give more, but it’s not like it’s a whole thing. We’re not as consistent as we need to be. We didn’t win two straight Cups and have that leeway. We have to play with that urgency every night on a consistent basis to be successful.” Sakic’s reluctance to break up the team’s core played at least some part in the division between the GM and former head coach Patrick Roy. Unless the Avalanche can turn things around relatively quickly, it’s going to look like Roy, and not Sakic, was correct in his assessment.
Snapshots: Kucherov, Wild, Dumoulin
While TSN’s Bob McKenzie noted yesterday that Tampa Bay RFA Nikita Kucherov is the most likely of the remaining restricted free agents to receive an offer sheet, he told TSN 690 in Montreal today (via Chris Nichols of Today’s Slapshot) that he doesn’t expect the Lightning to make him available in trade talks:
“Steve Yzerman is not, I don’t believe, going to make a conscious decision to trade him. Because I think of all of those guys, some of them that he signed recently like (Alex) Killorn – we’ll keep Hedman out of the equation because he’s a lynchpin on defense – but when you’ve got all of those guys… Palat is up next year, Tyler Johnson is up next year, you’ve got Killorn. Let’s be honest. The guys that you would think Steve Yzerman would be most interested in moving are guys like Val Filppula and some of the other guys up front, not Kucherov.”
On top of Killorn and Palat needing new deals next year, so too does Jonathan Drouin while Ben Bishop will be an unrestricted free agent. The team has roughly $5.5MM in cap space to work with this season according to Cap Friendly and have just over $55MM committed to 13 players already for 2017-18. While Yzerman has suggested in the past that he shouldn’t have to trade anyone to get Kucherov signed for this season, someone inevitably will have to go sooner rather than later.
Elsewhere around the hockey world:
- The Wild have a quartet of players drafted in the first two rounds back in 2009 that will be crucial to their success this season, writes Michael Russo of the Star-Tribune. Forwards Charlie Coyle, Mikael Granlund, Nino Niederreiter, and Jason Zucker are all 24, which in the eyes of GM Chuck Fletcher is a key year as it often represents the time that players have their breakthrough. The team didn’t change much up front over the summer and will be counting on those four to take another step forward offensively under new head coach Bruce Boudreau.
- After spending 2015-16 in a shutdown role, Pittsburgh defenseman Brian Dumoulin is looking to get more involved in the attack this season, notes Bill West of the Pittsburgh Tribune. After starting last year on the third pairing, he slowly worked his way up the lineup, finishing the postseason on the top pair while averaging nearly 22 minutes per night. He made a mark at the offensive end late in the postseason and wound up scoring in the Stanley Cup-clinching game which also was just his second goal in 103 games. With Olli Maatta now healthy, Dumoulin is in a battle in training camp to retain his top pairing spot alongside Kris Letang.