ST. PAUL, Minn. — The Minnesota Wild have plans and then they have contingency plans.
But truth be told, there’s no simple way to gameplan how exactly they’ll handle having three goaltenders on the roster this season.
“I’m confident it’ll work,” said Wild president of hockey operations and general manager Bill Guerin. “Sometimes there’ll be three. Sometimes there’ll be two,”
Winning will be the priority, so if Filip Gustavsson looks like the Filip Gustavsson of two years ago, he’ll naturally get the bulk of the workload. The same goes for soon-to-be 40-year-old Marc-Andre Fleury in what he says will be his 21st and final NHL season.
But the Wild also feel the necessity to make certain 2021 first-round pick Jesper Wallstedt gets significantly more than the three NHL games he got last season, an initial taste at the varsity level that concluded with a shutout in Chicago and a 27-save victory in San Jose.
“I think the most important thing is he gets some more NHL action but that he also plays an amount of games that he needs to play to keep developing,” Guerin said.
In other words, it’s going to be fluid.
“Maybe it’s a situation where all three look great, (but) we can’t carry all three for the time being, so maybe we carry two and send Wally down,” coach John Hynes said. “He plays, plays, plays and bang, he gets called up.”
A lot will depend on the salary cap.
Wallstedt carries a $925,000 salary cap. Assuming Marat Khusnutdinov and Liam Ohgren make the team and the Wild carry each of their seven one-way defensemen, the Wild would initially not be able to afford to recall a league-minimum forward if there was a short-term injury if Wallstedt’s on the roster.
So since Wallstedt doesn’t require waivers, there may be times he’s sent to Iowa for some roster and cap gymnastics in order to afford another player.
Or, even if there’s no injury, if Gustavsson’s going to start opening night against Columbus and Fleury the second game against Seattle, carrying Wallstedt right off the hop makes little sense until he’s needed. That would allow the Wild to accrue a little cap space until Wallstedt’s season debut.
Similar situations could occur throughout the season where it makes no sense to have him just practicing rather than getting game reps with the Baby Wild.
“Maybe we have a lighter game schedule for a week and maybe Iowa’s playing a lot of games, it might be advantageous to have Wally go play and then come back up,” Hynes said. “Or it might be the cap situation, so it’s going to be probably fluid moving forward for a while.”
Regardless, as of now, Guerin, Hynes and goalie coach Frederic Chabot haven’t communicated the plan to any of the three goalies because so much is up in the air.
“We just want the three of them focused on getting themselves to compete at a high level,” Hynes said. “When the time is right, or if the time even occurs, then we’ll talk about it.”
First things first, Wallstedt, 21, must prove in training camp he’s ready for the NHL level.
That process will begin Saturday night when Wallstedt starts and is expected to play the entire exhibition opener in Winnipeg. The Wild don’t plan to travel anything close to their anticipated opening night lineup, so Wallstedt will have to play behind a young team compromised of mostly prospects or Iowa-bound players.
“Sometimes I know that there’s a little bit of, ‘it’s just an exhibition game,’ but real hockey breaks out there,” Hynes said. “And he’s going to get tested, you know, on the road, in Winnipeg. … So is he comfortable in that? Is he confident? Is the size a factor? Is he reading plays? I think in the NHL it’s critically important how he fights through screens and rebounds and those second effort plays in and around the net. Can he make some big saves when we have breakdowns? … That’s one game, but he’s going to have a full camp to be able to be challenged in those situations and hopefully come through at a high level.”
Wallstedt understands there’s only so much he can control.
While being a ping-pong between Minnesota and Iowa this season could get dizzying and he may end up logging lots of I-35 clicks on the old odometer to and from Des Moines or oodles of frequent flier miles shuttling between the NHL and AHL, he knows he has a long career ahead of him, he’ll likely be fulltime in the NHL starting in 2025-26 and this is just part of the development process.
“It’s outside of my reach,” he said. “The only thing I can do is focus on what I do on a daily basis and as long as I bring it every day, if I push the other goalies in practice and try to show off good results in the games, I do all I can do. And if it’s up to cap space or whatever it is, that’s going to happen. It might happen, but that’s not something I can control.
“I’m just going to focus right now in training camp. It’s very far ahead to start looking at those things.”
Jesper Wallstedt on learning from M-A Fleury & Filip Gustavsson: “I think just being in their presence and definitely in Marc-Andre’s presence, just being around, seeing how he competes during his 21st NHL season and that’s how old I am. Just thinking about that is pretty crazy.” pic.twitter.com/3szb56FwVz
— Michael Russo (@RussoHockey) September 20, 2024
The bigger question may be how Gustavsson, 26, handles the awkward situation after a down 2023-24 season and an offseason in which Guerin pursued trading him in an attempt to open a roster spot solely for Wallstedt.
And just because he hasn’t moved yet doesn’t mean the team has stopped trying. Guerin has said publicly that he thought he had a trade complete for Patrik Laine, but the Columbus winger wouldn’t waive his no-trade clause to come to Minnesota before being dealt Montreal. It’s possible that Gustavsson was part of that package because it’s about the only plausible way the math worked.
Gustavsson is normally as friendly as can be with reporters, but on Friday during his first training camp session with local scribes, he was anything but during a start-to-finish, testy, three-minute exchange full of short answers to virtually every question.
Asked where his head was at coming into camp, Gustavsson said, “Well, it’s a new season, so you’re starting fresh against every other team. Fleury also needs to start fresh this year, too. So, that’s where we’re at.”
Asked his expectations role-wise with potentially three goalies on the roster at times, he said, “That I don’t know. I just play hockey.”
Asked if it was a tough summer with trade rumors swirling, he said, “No.”
Asked how he cleared his head after a tough 2023-24 campaign, he said, “I’ve got some good friends back home who don’t care about hockey, and if I’m not at the rink, I don’t think about hockey too much.”
Asked what it was like coming into the season with three goalies, he said, “I don’t know.”
Asked if he was unhappy about the situation, he said, “I don’t know. If they tell me to play, I play.”
Hynes wasn’t there during the session with Gustavsson. But when asked where he thinks Gustavsson’s mind was when provided with a CliffsNotes version of the back-and-forth, Hynes wasn’t concerned at all.
“He had a really good summer,” Hynes said. “(Chabot) was in communication with him and our strength coach (Matt Harder) went over (to Sweden) and met with him. We talked to him at the end of the year and I saw him over at the world championships, so I think he’s had a really good summer. He comes back and looks fit. He physically looks better and then mentally, I think he’s in a good head space.
“I know that he and (Chabot) have talked numerous times. Gus is a really good player, he’s a competitor, but he’s a laid-back guy. Like, I don’t think you’re ever going to get, ‘It’s my net. I want the net.’ I think he wants to come this year and play, and that’s OK. Like, we can allow him to be him. I’m going to allow him to be him, and whatever helps him and assists him to play his best that’s what we want to do. But from my reads on him, I think he’s in a good spot.”
And that is fair.
Gustavsson, who went 20-18-4 with a 3.06 goals-against average and .899 save percentage last season compared to a brilliant 22-9-7 season with a 2.10 goals-against average and .931 save percentage the year before, even said when asked about the platoon situation that he understands “who wins you games” is going to play.
“That’s the most important thing,” Gustavsson said. “You can’t win without goaltending in the league, and if someone’s playing really well and deserves to play, that’s who’s going to play.”
What a beauty Marc-Andre Fleury is. Says in his final trip around the league this year, “I don’t want any special treatment.” pic.twitter.com/w19jvGVCUH
— Michael Russo (@RussoHockey) September 19, 2024
Fleury echoed that sentiment, saying, “We haven’t sat down yet with Hynsie and Freddy to see how it’s going to go yet, but it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, I want to try to help the team as much as I can to get some wins and enjoy it in the meantime — work hard, get the guys going. Whatever it is.”
Like Gustavsson, Wallstedt also came to camp in much better shape than last year. Harder also visited Wallstedt while in Sweden, and while he worked hard off the ice, Wallstedt said he was on the ice a lot more than he had been in the previous offseason. His on-ice sessions consisted of 75-to-90-minute practices with his goalie coach and two shooters.
“Usually I try to stay off the ice as much as possible when I’m home,” Wallstedt said. “But these last two seasons I felt that when I got into camp I wasn’t in as good of shape as I could have been. Listening to the players over here and talking with the coaches, I tried to implement more ice over the summer and take two weeks off right after the year but then get back to ice as soon as possible to be able to get into camp in good shape and not feel like you have that week or two to try to get back into things.”
Wallstedt said despite the likely bouncing back and forth between the NHL and AHL this season, his goal is to take a spot straight out of camp. He also said practice is just as important as games.
“I think there’s definitely a benefit of both (playing in Minnesota and Iowa), but I definitely think that somehow we gotta try to find a good middle of that,” he said. “I have to prove that I belong up here as well. It’s not something that’s guaranteed. But in the long run, obviously try to play as many games as possible, but I can’t just think about games. You gotta practice. The habits in practice are just as important as playing games.
“You gotta be able to kind of get those habits on and play games with them, but you can’t get into the games if you don’t have the habits.”
Regardless of what happens, he’s excited to learn from Gustavsson and Fleury, a future Hall of Famer.
“I think just being in their presence and definitely in Marc-Andre’s presence, just being around, seeing how he competes during his 21st NHL season, and that’s how old I am,” Wallstedt said. “Just thinking about that is pretty crazy.
“The experience you get from that is so valuable to me and nothing you can take for granted. Being in this position I am in, it’s not a lot of young goalies that get this opportunity. So, I really try to take advantage of it and just being around him is very, very good for my development.”
(Top photo of Jesper Wallstedt: Melissa Tamez / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
