ST. PAUL, Minn. — Roster projections can sometimes be quite imaginative.
What if this guy pushes that guy? What if this guy comes out of nowhere to take that guy’s job? What if this guy is traded to make room for that guy?
For the Minnesota Wild, barring injury, their roster is pretty much set.
What will be fluid throughout the season is how the Wild navigate when and where to insert young goalie Jesper Wallstedt onto the roster and whether fellow first-round pick Liam Ohgren makes the team over a two-way contracted forward like, say, Travis Boyd or Reese Johnson.
The only real questions in camp are what players fall on what lines.
That means there will be real pressure on the returning core to be better than last year.
“I don’t wanna say turn the page, but we had a lot of guys, including myself, that just … it was a down year,” said veteran Marcus Foligno, coming off core muscle surgery for the second straight season. “It wasn’t ourselves. A lot of injuries as a team, and a slow start that really handicapped us.
“I think just going into this season, there’s a lot of excitement. Everyone’s got a chip on their shoulder. Expectations surrounding us on the outside are a little bit low, but it’s very high inside. So that’s what we’re excited about. Everyone’s coming in ready to roll, little bit ticked off, and I think that’s really good for our team.”
Coach John Hynes and his staff have initial ideas for lines early in camp. Usually, that indicates what they’re thinking to start the season. So those are pretty close to the ones we’re going with on our projected opening night lineup.
But Hynes has said repeatedly since before camp that he will give players looks in multiple positions, so there will be some tinkering and experimentation before the Oct. 10 season opener against the Columbus Blue Jackets.
This is Bill Guerin’s sixth season at the helm. The Wild have yet to get past the first round and last season missed the playoffs for only the second time since 2012.
So there’s a lot of pressure on him and the core of the team he invested in to prove he made the right decision to commit to them.
“Yeah, I feel urgency,” Guerin said. “I haven’t talked much about last year. I don’t like the way it went. I don’t like a lot about it, and I want to make sure that we have urgency this year, that we are afraid to fail. This is serious. There’s no room for how we started last year and how we were up and down. I know there were injuries and all that stuff, but we were pretty healthy at the start of the year.
“So guys better be ready.”
Centers
Believe it or not, the only line in hockey with a better expected-goals share than the Kirill Kaprizov-Joel Eriksson Ek-Matt Boldy line last season was Connor McDavid centering Zach Hyman and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins.
So naturally?
Break ‘em up.
Sarcasm aside, Hynes will always have that trio in his back pocket if need be, but the reason he’s going back to the well of two and three years ago and reuniting the Kaprizov-Ryan Hartman–Mats Zuccarello line is the Wild had little depth scoring beyond Kaprizov-Eriksson Ek-Boldy when Kaprizov and Zuccarello were separated last season.
“It doesn’t mean that line isn’t going to be thrown together at times, but coming in off the year, sometimes you can’t just come back the next year because one combination has been really good, because if the other ones weren’t very good, let’s find the reasons why,” Hynes said. “Maybe spread it out a little bit. Others as individuals have to play better. We have to help them play better. So I think if we came back and just put them back together, then everyone just slides back to where it was, and you’d like a little bit more fluidity, competition, where guys are coming in and there’s a little bit more juice to them, too, of, ‘oh jeez, now I’ve got to be ready to go.’”
Hartman scored 34 goals mostly playing with Kaprizov and Zuccarello three years ago, so the Wild are giving Hartman, one of their most versatile forwards, the initial look.
However, later in camp, Hynes said he plans to give Hartman a shot between Foligno and Yakov Trenin, meaning Marco Rossi, who is coming off a 21-goal, 40-point rookie season, will get a shot on the first or second line. Let’s be honest: Foligno-Hartman-Trenin has the makings of a prototypical checking line and could give opposing top lines fit because all three hit hard and play mean.
And then of course there’s Minnesota’s best center — Eriksson Ek, who is coming off a career-high 30 goals and 64 points. Eriksson Ek is a net-front menace and human punching bag who can play with top liners like Kaprizov and Boldy or in a checking role like he did for years with Foligno and Jordan Greenway.
Right now, Hynes is trying to see if playing him with Marcus Johansson and Boldy could reignite the chemistry they had two years ago when Johansson was acquired at the trade deadline.
“I think the easy thing would be to just go back to that one line that had success last year,” Guerin said. “We don’t want one line just to have success. We need multiple lines to have success. We need to regain chemistry in some lines that we had before — and create new ones.”
Marat Khusnutdinov, who debuted late last season after his KHL season ended, is cemented as the fourth-line center. He’s a free-wheeling forward who got a taste of the league down the stretch. The Wild hope that makes him feel more comfortable this season, a year in which they hope he had more of an offensive threat element.
Left wings
This is a massive year for Kaprizov, and maybe more so for the Wild because Kaprizov is entering the fourth year of his five-year contract, meaning he’s extension-eligible starting July 1, 2025.
They have to prove to him they are true contender, not just now, but into the future. Kaprizov loves Minnesota and has had incredible success here, winning the Calder Trophy four years ago and following it up with three 40-goal seasons.
Kaprizov is 27 years old and wants to win. The Wild are aware many teams would pursue him as an unrestricted free agent.
That ratchets up the pressure.
Behind Kaprizov, the Wild don’t have a lot of scoring depth.
Johansson is getting the first look at left wing of the second line, but he is coming off a disappointing season and doesn’t offer much when he’s not scoring. But he’s also not built for a bottom-six role. So it will be interesting to see if Ohgren, who began training camp on a line with Reese Johnson and Brendan Gaunce, can earn his way up the lineup and perhaps even into that second-line left-wing role.
Ohgren, 20, left the Swedish Hockey League after his season last year with Farjestad and played four NHL games, scoring a goal and assist in his second NHL game at San Jose. Starting in Iowa wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for him, but there’s no doubt Wild fans would love to see him land a roster spot.
Foligno’s defensive metrics were solid last season, but from Christmas on, he was playing hurt and just couldn’t find that explosiveness in his skating because of it. When healthy, Foligno is a direct-line skater who plays physical, fights and goes to the net. While scoring 23 goals like he did in 2021-22 is probably asking for much, he certainly can add more offensively than the 8.5 he’s averaged the past two years.
On the fourth line, the Wild actually would be willing to let Ohgren start there, but they also acquired Jakub Lauko in the Vinni Lettieri trade with Boston. So far, Hynes likes what he sees from another straight-line skater who hits hard and is willing to drop the gloves.
Right wings
There are two big reasons why Zuccarello is starting camp back on the first line, and they’re both related.
First and foremost, he has exceptional chemistry with Kaprizov. The Russian superstar is always Zuccarello’s first option with every pass and he usually hits him right on the tape in a perfect shooting position. Secondly, Zuccarello’s production at even strength tailed off dramatically without Kaprizov last season, scoring only two goals and five assists without him at five-on-five.
So if Zuccarello looks like the playmaking extraordinaire again reunited with Zuccarello and that deepens the offensive output of the other lines, dislodging Boldy from Kaprizov’s right wing makes sense.
Plus, Boldy, 23, has 60 goals the past two seasons and everybody that has watched him in the weeks leading into camp expects him to seriously pop this season. He was tremendous at the World Championship, scoring six goals and 14 points in eight games for the United States, and the Boston native spent the majority of the summer in Minnesota working out and skating at the Wild’s practice facility.
He’s prolific on the power play and is expected to add penalty kill to his repertoire this season.
The Wild’s big free-agent pickup, to the tune of four years and $14 million, was Trenin, the former Nashville Predators and Colorado Avalanche winger. He adds an infusion of physicality, racking up 705 hits in 299 games. Hynes has also seen the best of him, coaching Trenin in Nashville during his best season, a 17-goal campaign in a bottom-six role in 2021-22.
Preds GM Barry Trotz told The Athletic he could see Trenin scoring 20 goals in Minnesota, and Kaprizov also said Trenin showed in his younger days playing with and against him in Russia that he has the skill to score.
Freddy Gaudreau will be looking for a bounceback year. After signing a five-year extension two years ago on the night of the season finale of a 19-goal season, he only scored five last year and battled through a rib injury all season long. He’s coming into camp with a clear mind and hopes to rebound and ultimately work his way back up the lineup.
Defensemen
The biggest reason for optimism here is the return of captain Jared Spurgeon after he sustained a shoulder injury that knocked him out of the first month of last season and was limited to 16 games total after eventually undergoing season-ending hip and back surgeries starting last February.
Spurgeon has long been one of the Wild’s best defensemen and has terrific chemistry with Jake Middleton.
So the plan is to reunite them and pair Jonas Brodin with Calder Trophy runner-up Brock Faber, who had a sensational 39-assist, 47-point year and finished sixth in the NHL in average ice time. He was awarded with an eight-year, $68 million extension this past summer.
Spurgeon’s return to good health could lighten the load on Faber, whose games declined the last two months due in part to being overextended and in part because he was secretly playing with broken ribs for the final two months.
Faber and Declan Chisholm will platoon for power-play point time on the Nos. 1 and 2 power plays, but Hynes said Saturday that Chisholm’s five-on-five game will have to be up to par because with Spurgeon back, there will be no need to play a defenseman just because he’s a power-play guy.
Nevertheless, if Chisholm could be dynamic on the power play, Spurgeon is more than willing to be a sole penalty-kill guy and attempt to shore up one of the team’s biggest weaknesses last season.
Chisholm will be paired with Zach Bogosian, the good-skating, physical veteran who re-signed in Minnesota after coming in a trade with the Tampa Bay Lightning last November.
At seventh D, the Wild have veteran Jon Merrill. Technically, the Wild could bury $1.15 million of his $1.2 million in the minors and have a more inexpensive seventh defenseman if they wanted to save a little cap space. But as of now, there’s no indication they’re thinking that way.
Goalies
The Wild’s .897 save percentage last season tied for 25th in the NHL, and the bottom line is the Wild need improved seasons from both Filip Gustavsson and Marc-Andre Fleury in his 21st and final season.
Gustavsson, 26, went 20-18-4 with a 3.06 goals-against average and .899 save percentage last season after going 22-9-7 season with a 2.10 goals-against average and .931 save percentage the year before. That season, which earned him a new three-year contract, Gustavsson finished with the second-best goals-against average and save percentage in the NHL behind Vezina Trophy winner Linus Ullmark.
Fleury, who passed Patrick Roy for the second-most wins in NHL history and now has 561, hit the 1,000-game mark last season and finished 17-15-5 with a 2.98 goals-against average and .895 save percentage.
“Your goaltending is going to be as good as the team in front of you,” Guerin said. “There’ve been great goaltenders in the past that didn’t win because they didn’t have a very good team in front of them. You can’t do it all on your own. If you have a good D corps in front of you and your forwards play responsibly and they kill penalties well and they do all that, you’ll get better goaltending.
“We were missing key players last year, five-on-five and PK, and because of that, there’s more Grade A scoring chances against you and which what looks to be weaker goaltending. You guys look at the numbers and just say, ‘Welp, it wasn’t as good.’ That’s not always the case. Like, there’s a trickle-down effect from everything that goes on.”
Still, where both, especially Fleury, really need to be better is on the penalty kill, which finished 30th in the NHL at 74.5 percent.
For goalies that played at least 10 games, Gustavsson finished 19th with an .879 save percentage on the penalty kill and Fleury finished 69th of 73 goalies at .813.
The Wild re-signed Fleury for one last season in part to help mentor Wallstedt. The problem is they were unable to trade Gustavsson, so now they’re weighing when and how often to carry three goalies. The one thing that’s for certain: Guerin wants to get Wallstedt more NHL action this season than the three games he played last season. He finished the season with a shutout win at Chicago and then a solid effort during a victory in San Jose.
Make no mistake: He is considered the Goalie of the Future.
(Top photo of Ryan Hartman, Kirill Kaprizov and Mats Zuccarello: Rich Graessle / NHLI via Getty Images)
