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It’s no secret that the Minnesota Wild have struggled to find depth scoring this season, particularly from the fourth line. A quick glance at the organizational depth chart suggests that might not change anytime soon. Minnesota’s fourth line this season has primarily featured: Jakub Lauko (8 career goals in 121 NHL games played) Devin Shore (2 goals in his last 97 NHL games) Marat Khusnutdinov (2 career goals in 63 NHL games played) And Ben Jones (no goals in 26 NHL games played this season) While no team expects their fourth line to fill the back on the net regularly, they hope it can at least control possession so that the top lines can hop on the ice with the puck in the offensive zone as often as possible. However, that’s where the Wild’s fourth-line players have fallen short this season. Take a look at these possession metrics from MoneyPuck: While fourth-line players typically perform below the NHL average, the numbers above demonstrate less-than-ideal output. For context, all Winnipeg Jets forwards who have played significant minutes are above 48% in Corsi and expected goals percentage. In an ideal world, the Wild’s fourth line could produce somewhere in the same vicinity and give the top lines more opportunities to start shifts in the offensive zone each night. On Tuesday, The Athletic reported that Kirill Kaprizov will be out for at least four weeks to undergo surgery for his nagging lower-body injury. Therefore, the Wild’s depth will be tested once again, and it might be time for the Wild to provide other players with opportunities to make positive contributions to the fourth line. They should start with Caedan Bankier. I’ve watched Bankier closely since the Wild took him 86th in the 2021 draft. Most recently, I saw him when I attended the Iowa Wild’s home series against the Rockford Ice Hogs on January 17 and 18. The more I’ve watched Bankier play, the more I’ve become convinced that he’s the Wild’s future third-line center and that he has promise. He’s not ready to fill that role now, but the 6-foot-2, 192-pound center is trending in the right direction. Bankier has earned an opportunity to get a few games with the big squad. It’s been a tough season in Des Moines, where the team has suffered from the fifth-worst save percentage in the AHL. Iowa’s struggles are reflected in the skaters’ counting stats, and Bankier is no exception. He’s posted eight goals and nine assists in 40 games. While that’s unimpressive at first glance, it only tells part of the tale. As he’s developed over the past season and a half in Iowa, Bankier has slowly learned to use his size to influence possession. He has soft hands and makes crisp, accurate passes. These attributes, along with his superior hockey sense and responsible, two-way tendencies, have helped him grow into a player with a mature game that knows how to compete against professional players. He also can win faceoffs from the right side (you’ll have to take my word for it, as the AHL does not publish individual faceoff statistics). Considering that Khusnutdinov has only won 46.1% of draws thus far and has been unable to drive possession, Bankier could represent a clear upgrade, even if only for a few games. At the very least, he looks like a viable call-up option who can provide a different look. Bankier’s pro-level details and quality decision-making make him a reliable player. Consider the below clip from Iowa’s game against Rockford on January 18. None of that stuff is flashy. However, when players do it consistently, it drives winning. When Bankier came off the ice, the Iowa Wild had possession in the offensive zone, and Rockford hadn’t even come close to sniffing an offensive chance. It wasn’t a one-off, either. Bankier has moments like these regularly. Below is an example of him using his size and awareness to maintain possession in the offensive zone from a preseason game against Winnipeg: And lastly, watch him shrug off an attacker as he carries the puck up the wall in the neutral zone: None of this is to say that Bankier is close to a finished product, and there are warts to his game he must correct. He must learn to dictate moments and control pace with the puck on his stick, and he might benefit from a summer training with Andy Ness to add a bit of quickness to his lateral movements. Still, his game is coming along, and Wild fans should be excited. Caedan Bankier has earned the opportunity to play some NHL games, if only so he can be better prepared for when his time arrives. Undoubtedly, he can eventually become a quality third-line center in the NHL. When Wild fans get their first glimpse of him with the big squad, they’ll be able to see why.

What do newly-signed Yakov Trenin and newly extended Jake Middleton have in common with Marcus Foligno, Freddy Gaudreau, and Ryan Hartman? They're all perfectly fine NHL players who are perfectly able to succeed when in the correct role. What else do they have in common? The correct role for each of them (at least, on an elite team) is either in the bottom-six forwards or on the third defensive pair. The Minnesota Wild have also signed them through the 2026-27 season. All but Hartman are now under contract through the summer of 2028. These five role players are on the books for $16.05 million this upcoming season, a rate that rises to $17.95 million in the two following years. The $16.05 million represents about 18.2% of the current $88 million salary cap, and the $17.95 million comes out to be about 19.5% of the projected $92 million cap for 2025-26. When you allocate 18-19% of the salary cap to 21.7% of the roster, that doesn't sound too bad! Collectively, these players make less than their fair share of the roster. Unfortunately, that's not how NHL economics work. Look at the NHL's most successful teams and what they allocate for their depth players. It quickly becomes clear that the Wild are zagging while the smartest teams zig. The top teams set out to min-max their rosters, prioritizing star power, even at the expense of squeezing out the league's middle class. I'm not writing this out of disdain for role players. Instead, the fact that these "middle-class" players are easier to replace with cheaper, younger depth. If you aren't a top-six forward or a top-four defenseman, it's difficult to justify paying you $4 million when a kid on an ELC can do your job 80-90% as effectively. A world where a loyal member of an organization is unceremoniously phased out for cost-cutting is not a nice world! It's not the world that this hockey blogger would choose! However, it is the reality that the Players Association and league have negotiated. And in it, we have to look at these salaries in terms of how efficiently they utilize the team's resources. Use the Cup Champion Florida Panthers as a model, for example. They poured almost every dollar not nailed down into the top of the roster. Sergei Bobrovsky, Sasha Barkov, Matthew Tkachuk, Aaron Ekblad, and Sam Reinhart combined to make 52.1% of their salary cap. Doing that forced them to get incredible bargains or fill their roster with cost-effective players. They knocked it out of the park on the bargain front. Sam Bennett, Carter Verhaeghe, Brandon Montour, Evan Rodrigues, and Gustav Forsling added up to $17.76 million, less than the Wild will pay their "Five Guys" next year. Oliver Ekman-Larsson ($2.25M) and Niko Mikkola ($2.5M) were the only other players making between $2 and $5 million. Florida's fivesome added up to 16.9 Standings Points Above Replacement last season. Compare that to 2.5 from Minnesota's "Five Guys" last year. As much as the Wild talk about down seasons from the likes of Hartman, Gaudreau, and Foligno, this fivesome was only worth 4.1 SPAR in 2022-23. The Edmonton Oilers also min/maxed their roster, with their top seven players soaking up 56.5% of the cap. They didn't get the amount of home runs that Florida got from their middle-class players, aside from Evan Bouchard ($3.9M). Still, their middle-class bloat was minimal. Their middle class includes Bouchard and starting goalie Stuart Skinner ($2.6M), then Cody Ceci ($3.25M), Warren Foegele ($2.75), and Brett Kulak ($2.75). Not great, but at least they're few and cheap. Go down the line. The Dallas Stars had seven players in their middle-class bracket (adding up to $20.5 million). However, those players included Jake Oettinger, Joe Pavelski, Matt Duchene, and Mason Marchment. You'll take a starting goalie and 74 goals for that price any day, thank you very much. The New York Rangers round out the Conference Finalists. Who was in their middle class? Five players. Top-pairing defenseman K'Andre Miller ($3.872M), 28-goal, 57-point Alexis Lafrenière ($2.235M), Barclay Goodrow ($3.642M), Ryan Lindgren ($3M), and Kaapo Kakko ($2.1M). That's just under $15 million for their middle class, with two impact players in there, and even that was too expensive for New York. The Rangers dumped Goodrow to waivers to clear precious cap room. Sorry to the role players. While the "Five Guys" are the most egregious examples of middle-class bloat, they're far from the limit of its scope. Mats Zuccarello put up 63 points last season, granted, but is turning 37 before the season starts and will make $4.125 in two years. Minnesota didn't (couldn't?) trade Filip Gustavsson, who was a sub-.900 goalie last year and is making $3.75 million next season. Marc-Andre Fleury turns 40 in November and makes $2.5 million against the cap. Marcus Johansson scored just 11 goals and 30 points last year and comes at a $2 million cap hit next season. Add all that up, and that's nine middle-class guys coming in at $28.245 million. Fleury and Johansson come off the books after next season. Still, that's about 26% of the cap devoted to seven players who generally aren't moving the needle. That's not how the top teams do things. They pay the players they can't replace and replace the ones they can when they get too expensive. Minnesota did this once upon a time, developing the likes of Brandon Duhaime and Connor Dewar while bringing in cheaper, younger versions of Hartman, Gaudreau, and Middleton. The cap is going up, and the Wild are about to get nearly $15 million of dead cap coming off the books. They also have talented prospects on ELCs. Therefore, they can afford luxuries; that's indisputable. But if you gave Florida or New York that flexibility to get luxuries they would (and did) spend it on bringing in stars like Tkachuk long-term. If you gave Dallas the ability to afford luxuries, they would (and did) spend it to bring in high-upside plays like Duchene and Marchment on the cheap. What did the Wild splurge on with their future windfall? A handful of role players who will spend most of their deals playing on the third-and-fourth lines and pairings. Guerin must believe that these players, with their grit, jam, etc., are the key to bringing Minnesota where they want to go. He has to be right, or the Wild will find themselves with expensive anchors while the smart teams keep sailing past them.

Somehow, the biggest lightning rod in the Minnesota Wild's abbreviated playoff run was the player with the team's third-fewest minutes. But that's what fans will focus on when a team takes Marco Rossi, their second-leading scorer in the regular season, and plays him for 11 minutes and 8 seconds per night. For context, that's less than Marat Khusnutdinov, a fourth-line center with seven points in 57 games, got during the regular season. Having seen the Wild's postseason play out, it's clear what happened. John Hynes (and possibly Bill Guerin, judging from some of his radio comments) decided that Rossi couldn't make an impact in a series against the Vegas Golden Knights. He started on the third line with Marcus Foligno and a clearly washed Gustav Nyquist, a role Rossi hadn't been in all season. After struggling in his playoff debut, the Wild demoted him to the fourth line with Yakov Trenin and Justin Brazeau. And that's where he stayed. Scoring goals in back-to-back games didn't get him out of the doghouse. Engaging physically in Game 5, where he registered three hits and three blocked shots, didn't do the trick, either. No style of play, no level of success was getting him off the fourth line. There was nothing he could do. In doing so, the Wild doomed Rossi to their self-fulfilling prophecy. By treating him as if he couldn't make an impact, they put him in a position where he was least capable of making one. Despite the three points in six games -- a 0.50 PPG average that is, mind you, tied for 19th in franchise history, between Kevin Fiala (0.53 PPG) and Mikko Koivu (0.47) -- Minnesota got a result they can point to and back up their suspicions. His detractors (including those in the Wild organization) can point to three flashpoints: Rossi being on the ice for the Game 5 overtime goal. His double minor in Game 6. And his having the worst expected goals percentage at 5-on-5 this series, as noted by The Athletic. Make of the errors what you'd like, I guess. Rossi was part of that Game 5 breakdown -- although there's a pretty good case that Zach Bogosian was more responsible. Even though Brayden McNabb lifted Rossi's stick into his own face in Game 6, Rossi still has to control his stick. But as for his expected goals percentage... what did the Wild expect? Out of 18 forwards with 150-plus minutes at 5-on-5 for the Wild during the regular season, Trenin was 10th in goals for percentage (44.4) and 11th in expected goals for percentage (47.5). Brazeau ranked dead last in both categories. Both players were in the bottom half of generating actual and expected goals per hour. That trio didn't generate offense outside of two nice passes off a Trenin forecheck. The Rossi-Trenin duo combined to get just a 28.5% share of the expected goals in their limited time on the ice. Minnesota generated expected goals at a rate of 0.99 per hour with that tandem, which is abysmal. When apart from Trenin, his expected goals share boosted up to 49.3%, and the Wild generated 2.44 expected goals per hour. If you're looking for a reason why Rossi would have disappointing numbers with Trenin and Brazeau, it's not hard to figure out. There's a reason Hynes doesn't consider playing Matt Boldy or Kirill Kaprizov on the fourth line for an entire playoff series. Maybe you're thinking something like, Look, a player isn't entitled to a spot in the lineup because they scored 60 points in the regular season. This is professional sports. It's not about fairness or being a hard-working kid with a good attitude who does everything the team asks of him. It's about results. And, hey, maybe that's right. So let's take a look at Rossi's results. In 66:47 of all-situations time, Rossi scored three points. Mind you, only 3:30 of that was on the power play, less time than the likes of Nyquist and Marcus Johansson. Despite being a power play afterthought, he put up 2.70 points per hour during his ice time. For fun, here's a list of Wild players who Rossi's career points per hour rate beats out: Zach Parise, 2.66 points per hour Kirill Kaprizov, 2.40 points per hour Marian Gaborik, 2.36 points per hour Ryan Hartman, 2.30 points per hour Jason Pominville, 2.28 points per hour Wes Walz, 2.26 points per hour Brian Rolston, 2.03 points per hour Kevin Fiala, 1.89 points per hour Pavol Demitra, 1.86 points per hour Matt Boldy, 1.86 points per hour Eric Staal, 1.86 points per hour Nino Niederreiter, 1.82 points per hour Small sample size, but damn, that sounds like someone Minnesota should've put on the ice if they wanted not to lose three games by a goal each. Only Hynes didn't do that. It's one thing for a coach to bury his team's second-leading scorer on the fourth line and win the series. They can claim they pushed the right buttons, and scoreboard. Who's gonna argue? But when they lose a series of one-goal games? There are gonna be questions to answer, especially for a coach whose playoff results aren't exactly above reproach. It was a predictable outcome for the Wild, partly because they ensured it, both for Rossi and the series as a whole. Minnesota played Rossi on the fourth line, and now they can claim he played like a fourth liner. That makes sense. The logical conclusion for Hynes turning his third-most-potent scoring threat into a fourth-liner was the one we saw. The Wild offense drying up the second Kaprizov and Boldy started running out of gas. Don't worry -- with the increasingly inevitable Rossi trade coming up, it appears that no lessons will be learned from any of this.

The Minnesota Wild are building the foundations of a solid future. Experts believe Minnesota’s front office drafts well, and several prospects appear ready to make an impact in the NHL. Marat Khusnutdinov, Liam Ohgren, and Jesper Wallstedt have all played games for the Wild this year. Meanwhile, Danila Yurov seems to be on the way soon. The team's farm system is so good that Scott Wheeler recently ranked them second in the NHL in his yearly prospect rankings. Wheeler had them at 11th in the same rankings last year. The heavy lifting of the improved ranking is the new crown jewel of the Wild's prospect pool. Zeev Buium. When the Wild drafted Buium 12th overall in last year's draft, people immediately considered him a steal. We ranked Buium as the Wild's third-best prospect entering the season behind Yurov and Wallstedt, and the pick has only aged better since. Buium is a great defender with a winning pedigree. He had just finished a historic season at Denver University, becoming the first teenager to score 50 points in a season in over 20 years. Buium has built on his breakout year. In his second year at Denver, he turned himself into more than just a good prospect that the Wild got as a draft steal. Instead, the Californian is now a genuine top-defensive prospect in the league. After a draft year as productive as Buium's, imagining how he could improve was difficult. How do you improve historic scoring totals capped off by a national championship and World Juniors Gold Medal? Buium has answered by refining his impressive arsenal of skills. Last year, Buium showed the ability to be a positive player in every phase of the game. He wasn't bad defensively, but his offensive prowess stood out. Buium has been more committed to improving his defensive play and dominating possessions this season. "The harder I play in my own end and take pride in it," Buium told the Star Tribune, "the more likely I'm not going to be playing defense as much." It's an approach that has already resulted in better all-around play and even improved his offense. Buium isn't letting the game come to him. Instead, he's involving himself in every level of play. A player who can make a strong defensive play in his own end, execute a breakout pass, join the rush, and set up in the offensive zone all at the same time? That's a dangerous skill. Denver and Team USA coach David Carle also spoke about this ability. "He knows he needs to crank it up a little bit," Carle said. "So, that's what I think is really impressive about him is he has an ability to interpret what the game needs from him, and he can adapt and give it what it needs." His hockey IQ and high-end skills make him an elite offensive organizer. When Buium is on the ice, Denver's play on both ends flows through him. He's a smooth-skating puck-mover and a breakout quarterback. His mix of instincts, speed, and commitment to defense allow him to overcome his average stature in making plays in his end. When you compare Buium to some of the league's top defenders, he fits the mold of a modern elite NHL defender. He plays college hockey and doesn't have elite size, but he isn't small, either. He can play an extremely well-rounded game, even if explosive offense is his primary weapon. Players like Cale Makar, Quinn Hughes, Adam Fox, and Charlie McAvoy are similar and among the league's most elite blueliners. While Buium's play has been encouraging, it is impossible to look past the eye-popping stat sheet. Early in the season, Buium was producing but not quite at the level he had in his previous year. With no goals and 10 points in his first 10 games, the blueliner had impressive production but not the elite scoring we saw in his 50-point freshman campaign. Part of that decreased production was due to Buium's evolving role at Denver, which includes more responsibility. The team relies on him more defensively and as a play-driver than last season. Buium focused more on the process than the results. His stats indicate that his investment in improving his overall game is paying meaningful dividends. Buium's stat sheet production is catching up with his play. Now, he's scoring at a similar pace to last season while still playing a more well-rounded game. He has 32 points in 26 games, including 13 in his previous 10. That's a rate of 1.23 points per game, better than the 1.19 points he registered as a freshman. His 32 points are the most among college defenders. If Denver makes a deep run, he could have another 50-point season. Since 2009-10, only two defenders, Buium and Brendan Smith, have reached that 50-point mark in college hockey. Now, Buium has an opportunity to do it twice. Buium has myriad elite skills he’s constantly improving. He is also a historic producer. Those two attributes would already be enough to make him a top prospect. However, he also has a track record of being a consummate winner. Even at 19, Buium has already experienced more winning than many great hockey players do in their careers. In his freshman season, he won the national championship with Denver and played a key role in winning a gold medal for the USA at the 2024 World Juniors. He followed up that gold medal this year with another in the 2025 World Juniors, the first time the USA won back-to-back golds at the premiere event for junior-aged players. Buium again played a vital role, providing a beautiful assist on the overtime game-winning goal. The entire team wanted that game badly, but Buium had a burning desire to win hockey games. After the assist, the defender hesitated to join the celebratory scrum, focusing more on winning the game than celebrating. "I just wanted to win that game so bad," Buium recalled. "I wasn't even thinking about a celebration. I just didn't want to lose." Buium's ultra-competitive spirit has been evident at every level of hockey. That intangible quality completes his profile as one of the top prospects in the NHL. The Minnesota Wild are getting an elite talent. Buium affects the game just as much off the scoresheet as he does off it. He’s a defender who profiles as a top-pairing, play-driving defender. Most of all, Minnesota will be welcoming a winner. Time will tell if Buium can carry all of that to the NHL. For now, he's one of the best prospects in the league and is only improving.