All Minnesota Wild fans know the pain of losing in the first round way too well. They thought last season was going to be the end of that pain, at least in the first round. The end of their team’s season ending in the first round. The end of their team not living up to their potential. Unfortunately, that familiar pain returned when the St. Louis Blues won 3 straight games to end what appeared to be the greatest season in franchise history.
It was the greatest regular season in franchise history and though that was a ton of fun to watch, that’s not what any fan wants from their team. The President’s Trophy* is not the goal. It doesn’t get taken around the world to show the fans. Why does it even exist? Who proudly displays they won it? Who wants to see it? Does it have a “keeper” like big Stan does? Who knows and who cares? It probably sits in a box somewhere in the team’s facility collecting dust.
*If you didn’t know, the President’s Trophy is awarded to the team with the most points in the regular season.
Year One!
Last season was year 1 for a new era of Minnesota Wild hockey. It was year 1 of a new culture. A new culture that produced that great regular season. That team competed until the final buzzer. They never gave up. They were strong in almost every facet of the game. One of their strongest traits was their mental toughness. They always had the confidence they could come back no matter what adversity they had to overcome. They would respond to goals against, losses and bad stretches. They scored more late extra-man goals than any other team in the National Hockey League.
That’s why it was so shocking to watch how the season ended in the playoffs. They took a 2-1 series lead with a convincing win in St. Louis in Game 3 but the experience of the Blues took over and the Wild looked like a different team, a beaten team, for the next 3 games. A goal against took the life out of them and had them hanging their heads. We didn’t see much or any of that in the regular season. The one obvious player that was still confident throughout was 97. Kirill Kaprizov never stopped battling for his team.
The Education of Losing
Do players keep watching the playoffs after their season ends? It must be difficult to do but there’s also lessons that can be learned from watching a team win it all. How did they do it? What adversity did they overcome?
There’s a saying, “You have to lose before you can win.” Like failure, you can’t avoid losing but you can learn from it. You gain experience and knowledge of what it takes to succeed & win…
a Q&A article from The Athletic*:
“We got to be f—ing better as a coaching staff. Clearly, we all didn’t handle that situation good enough. So once we get our group, once we get to that group, we are going to speak of that a lot. And we are going to be in a position where we push each other. As I said, I talk about the players making the other player accountable. We have to do the exact same thing on our end, too. We have to be better. Period. We have to give the tools to the players to be prepared. And we didn’t do a good enough job of doing that, so we’re going to push all of us in that direction. There’s nothing we can do about last year, right? Except learn from it and do something different, no different than our PK. We have to do something different that we feel will allow us to have success.”
*The Athletic comes highly recommended from us, Clutter Certified if you will. They always have great deals going on, currently at $1/month HERE!
It’s awesome to hear the coach talk about how much he thinks he & his staff need to be better and to see how much passion he has for it. He felt they failed their team too often so it’s going to be different this season. That’s how you develop into a better team.
The biggest system changes will be on special teams as the Minnesota Wild’s Power Play & Penalty Kill didn’t help them enough last season. They were ranked 18th on the Power Play at 20.5% and 25th on the Penalty Kill at 76.1% so…those “teams” were not special. So they’re going to use more personnel in both situations and be a lot more aggressive on the Penalty Kill. The PK struggled to clear the puck because they too often tried a prayer heave to get the puck out of the zone that didn’t work so they’ll go with more of a teamwork way of clearing the puck by finding a teammate who can clear the puck more easily. The preseason showed a definite improvement in both of those areas.
The preseason also had them trying different lineups and defensive pairings which is another change from last season when they pretty much kept the same lines & pairs for the majority of the season. Part of that is due to it being preseason and finding out who is making the team but it should help to already have some experience playing with other teammates.
Rumor has it the Wild will go with a top pair of Jared Spurgeon & Jonas Brodin from time to time, maybe at home when they have the last change so they can match up against the opponents top line.
But…
This was Always the Plan.
One of the biggest reasons Minnesota Wild General Manager Bill Guerin bought out the contracts of D Ryan Suter & F Zach Parise was because they believed in the talent they had in their prospects & their depth and they expected a few of those prospects to make an impact very soon.
Billy G did those buyouts to have cost certainty instead of having to wonder if Suter & Parise would retire and then be surprised by a huge salary cap recapture penalty. The buyouts are a huge cap penalty ($12,743,588 this season & $14,743,588 in both 2023-24 & 2024-25) but he knows exactly what his cap is now or cost certainty.
Prospects under Entry-Level Contracts (ELC) make a maximum of $925K in 2022 and those contracts can be a maximum of 3 years long but they can “slide” or extend by 1 year depending on if the player is 18 or 19 years old or if they played less than 10 NHL games in the regular season &/or the playoffs. If those Wild prospects can make the jump, they can help the team immensely from a Salary Cap standpoint.
We already saw F Matt Boldy make an impact last season with 39 points (15 goals, 24 assists) including 10 (3g, 7a) on the power play for a 0.83 point per game rate which was 5th on the team last year. That would be 68 points over a full 82-game season and it’s safe to say the Wild & Matt Boldy expect more than that. Fs Brandon Duhaime & Connor Dewar, D Calen Addison and G Kaapo Kähkönen were also on ELCs last season..
Add this to the many reasons why you have to draft & develop well.
Youth Going Wild
Enter Marco Rossi…
Drafted 9th overall in the 2022 NHL Draft, Marco Rossi was coming off a monster season as an 18-year-old in the Ontario Hockey League. He scored 120 points on 39 goals & 81 assists in just 56 games. Minnesota Wild Director of Amateur Scouting Judd Brackett definitely had his eye on him:
How the Wild Selected Marco Rossi
We’re starting to see just how lethal Marco Rossi can be. It’s just preseason but he led the league in points (9) & assists (7). He looked like he belonged out there and maybe more importantly, he looked comfortable like he knew he belonged in the National Hockey League. He played with Kirill Kaprizov and Mats Zuccarello in the last preseason game and he made plays, scored . It’s pretty unbelievable that he fell to the Wild and the 9th pick. We’ll see if that becomes even more unbelievable as this season and his career moves along.
He scored 53 points on 18 goals and 35 assists in 63 games for the Iowa Wild in the AHL last season after missing the majority of the 2020-21 season due to Covid-19 and myocarditis, a broad term that essentially means inflammation of the heart.
Marco Rossi’s scare with COVID-19 & myocarditis
That is beyond scary for everyone involved. Thankfully he was able to get through that and get back to being healthy and living a normal life so he could keep pursuing his dream of playing in the NHL. It also puts into perspective just how impressive Marco’s season was since he was getting back to playing hockey and feeling comfortable again.
Rossi will get most of the publicity because he’s the top prospect in the Minnesota Wild’s system and he’s a forward that puts up points but there’s another pretty hyped prospect who made the team out of camp in D Calen Addison.
“What about #56 like you’ve had?… 59?” Classic!
Marco Rossi didn’t look surprised when he was told, did he?
Calen Addison is a puck-moving d-man who can skate very well and brings offense. He has 58 points (13 goals, 45 assists) in 77 career games including 4 power play goals in the American Hockey League. He quarterbacked the top power play unit in the preseason. He can hold his own on the defensive end and does the little things that you like to see like putting his stick blade in front of the offensive player when they have the puck. Ryan Suter may have taught him that one. He’s only 5’11 & 173 lbs so he uses his body to lean on guys when he feels the need. It helps to learn from captain Jared Spurgeon.
Don’t sleep on F Connor Dewar, either. He came up from Iowa last season when the Wild needed him and he was able to contribute with a seamless transition to how the Wild play. He has a physical edge to his game but he also has shown a scoring touch in the past. He was almost at a point-per-game level in 19 games in Iowa last season with 17 points on 8 goals & 9 assists.
Goodbye and Good Puck
The Minnesota Wild didn’t lose much from last season’s roster when it comes to total players lost as just 6 players left the team either via trade or as free agents.
Welcome to Minnesota, The State of Hockey.
With only a few players leaving, there were only a few new additions to the 2022-23 Minnesota Wild roster and even fewer since a couple of those spots were taken by players already in the system. On the first day of free agency, the Wild only added veteran depth pieces to two-way contracts in Fs Nicolas Petan (2 year contract), Steven Fogarty (2 year contract) & Brandon Baddock (1 year contract) and D Andrej Sustr (1 year contract). Nicolas Petan & Steven Fogarty showed well as they were 2 of the final cuts of training camp so we might see them with the big Wild at some point this season. Baddock was acquired via trade last season when G Andrew “Hamburglar” Hammond was sent to Montreal. He’s a big physical enforcer-type player.
D Andrej Sustr made the Wild out of camp. He’s a 6’7, 217-lb defenseman who has played 341 NHL games over the past 9 seasons with the Tampa Bay Lightning & the Anaheim Ducks. He’s a good player to have as a 7th defenseman. We’ll see what happens when D Jon Merrill is healthy enough to return to the active roster.
The Wild signed one of us when they were able to agree with former Minnesota Gopher F Sammy Walker. He was a 7th-round pick of the Tampa Bay Lightning in the 2017 NHL Draft. He was given a taste of the NHL during training camp but we assume the Wild want him to play the whole season in the AHL to learn professional hockey. You never know how quickly players will develop, though. Being a 3-year captain of one the elite college hockey program says something & he did put up some points in his college career with 112 points (48 goals, 64 assists) with a 12-goal, 28-point average season always scoring double-digit goals. He has speed and talent so he’s definitely someone to keep an eye on as the season progresses.
It took until August 30th, 48 days after free agency began, for the Wild to sign a free agent to a 1-way contract when they signed F Sam Steel to a 1-year, $825K contract. This is Bill Guerin and the Wild’s staff believing there’s a lot more potential in a young former 1st-round pick who may just need a change of scenery after playing for the Anaheim Ducks for the first 4 seasons of his career. This is similar to why they acquired F Tyler Jost last season. They see a player with talent who can do more when put in a better situation.
A Flower in the Net…
G Marc-Andre Fleury was acquired to be The Man in the crease in the playoffs. He was a step up from Cam Talbot because he had the experience of winning a Cup (x3). He was very good in the regular season as he won 9 of his 11 starts. He wasn’t the reason the Wild lost in the first round. The Wild could’ve had a very good goalie tandem this season. It may have been a 1A & 1A situation as both are capable of being the number one goalie for the Minnesota Wild.
Unfortunately, Cam Talbot didn’t see that working well so Bill Guerin sent him to Ottawa for young backup G Filip Gustavsson who will enter his 1st season as part of a tandem in the National Hockey League. This tends to worry some fans because his stats don’t necessarily shine brightly over his career. He’s from Sweden and it’s a different game in North America which is likely something he’s found out over the past 4 seasons going back & forth between the American Hockey League and the National Hockey League. Stats are never really a good way to judge a player overall. He’s helped Sweden win medals and was named Goaltender of the tournament in the 2018 World Junior Championships.
We know to expect very good results from Marc-Andre Fleury even as he turns 38 on November 28th. This team will give both goalies every chance to win in the majority if not every game.
Continue Culture
Year 1 of the big change in this team’s culture produced the greatest regular season in their history with 9 players having career best years in points. That same culture will push them to do the same thing again while also showing any other players they have the same opportunity for success.
That old line we hear in Minnesota so often, “It’s the same team every year.” is never true. This team should be better. They’re growing together. They have everything they need to get over the hump of first-round failures. They’ll definitely face some adversity but they’ll be accountable to each other with the end goal always being to win the battle, the shift, the period, the game, the series and The Stanley Cup!
Do you think you’d succeed with 22 associates and an entire staff of coaches reiterating that you have the skills to play and produce at the top of the industry you work in?
Your 2O22-23 Minnesota Wild Lines
Look at that Lineup!
There you go. That’s the roster the Minnesota Wild will use to try to get back to where they were a season ago, home ice in the first round. Anything is possible with that Lil’ Russian on your team!
The Stanley Cup is the goal! Nothing More! Nothing Less!
––––– CP –––––
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