By Tony Abbott -
Charlie Stramel was supposed to hit the reset button this season. Coach Tony Granato coached the Wisconsin Badgers to one of their worst seasons in recent memory and put pressure on 18-year-old Stramel immediately as a top-line center. Stramel only mustered five goals and 12 points in 33 games in his freshman season.
Everything about the following summer screamed fresh start. The Minnesota Wild still liked his physical toolkit -- namely, his 6-foot-3, 223 lbs. frame and his skating -- enough to take him with the 21st pick in the 2023 NHL Draft. Out went Granato, and in came Minnesota State Mankato coach Mike Hastings, with some of his old players following. The change should have allowed Stramel to put his freshman season behind him and spend his sophomore year on a more talented, structured team.
Wisconsin got more talented and structured, finishing second in the Big Ten standings and making the NCAA tournament. But that came at a price, at least for Stramel. Hastings imported three of Wisconsin's top five forwards in scoring -- David Silye (age 25), Simon Tassy (23), and Christian Fitzgerald (21) -- from Mankato. Hockey fans know that NHL coaches like to play their guys, players they know, like, and are familiar with. Hastings was no exception, and in all fairness to him, look at the results.
It didn't go well for Stramel, though. He suffered an early injury, which seemed to put him behind the 8-ball, and he never truly caught up. All of that conspired to keep him in fourth-line minutes all season, and he scored only three goals and eight points in 34 games.
Nobody can spin having two straight lost seasons into being a good thing. It's also true that Stramel was perceived as a lower-ceiling player, at least compared to an immensely skilled Gabriel Perreault, who went off the board two picks later and has 18 goals and 57 points for the Frozen Four-bound Boston College Eagles. If anyone says that the New York Rangers look better for picking Perreault than the Wild for picking Stramel, that's pretty indisputable right now.
All that can be true. Even so, the vitriol toward the pick on draft day was too far, and it's only ratcheted up in intensity as Stramel muddled through a season of fourth-line duty. From the jump, it's been a race to be the first (and loudest) to call Stramel a bust. There is no word yet on what the prize the NHL is offering for the winner will be.
If we want to compare hit rates, though, the Minnesota Wild's scouting staff has a much stronger track record than the Fans Who Cried "Bust!" You only need to look to last year to find a high-profile miss, when people practically left Marco Rossi for dead after he scored one point in 19 games. Now, he's in the running to finish as a Calder Trophy finalist after a 20-goal season.
We can do more. The same doubts were cast over Matt Boldy after he struggled through a disaster in the first half of his Draft+1 year at Boston College. Boldy scored one goal and three points in his first 15 games after the Wild made him the No. 12 overall pick in the 2019 Draft. Like Stramel, Boldy even got snubbed from Team USA's World Junior camp. Once Boldy found a role that suited him, the rest was history.
And, of course, there's the Ur example of the Wild taking Joel Eriksson Ek over Burnsville native Brock Boeser in 2015. Boeser is a great player, cracking the 30-goal mark for the first time this season, with a good shot at putting up 40 goals for the Vancouver Canucks this year. You'll probably die wandering the wilderness before you find a Wild fan who would go back in time and reverse that decision.
Giving the Wild fan base some credit, let's look at Danila Yurov, the guy Minnesota didn't declare a bust despite having a fairly similar journey to Stramel. When the Wild drafted Yurov at 24th overall in 2022, he was coming off a season in which he scored zero points in 40 KHL games (regular season and playoffs). The following year, he only scored 12 in 70 KHL contests.
It wouldn't have been difficult to write him off, but Minnesota prospect watchers intuitively understood that Yurov's role in the KHL was not suited to what he did best. He neither got the ice time nor on-ice opportunities a prospect needs to flourish in any league. Once he did, he went out and bested the KHL points record for a 20-year-old player.
If Wild fans can extend that kind of grace to a dude from Chelyabinsk, why can't they do the same for a player who grew up in Rosemount? The last time he played for a program that wasn't completely terrible and gave him more than fourth-line minutes was two years ago with the US Development Program. He scored 15 points (7 goals) in 16 USHL games and 22 points (10 goals) in 26 games with the Under-18 USA team, then 2 goals and 5 points in 6 games at the Under-18 World Juniors. Pretty good!
Fans should remember that whether they liked the pick or not, there were good reasons for the Wild to take Stramel in the first round. He has a rare combination of size and skating ability, which is valuable for a team short on size for quite some time. Targeting size in the draft is probably a better way to get bigger than overpaying for free agents or trading Calder-contending rookies because they're 5'9".
They should also remember that a 19-year-old kid has almost no say in any of this. A player can control what they do on the ice but can't pick where they get drafted. They can't stop their teams from changing coaches and bringing an influx of older, more experienced top-six players. They can't call their own number to boost their ice time.
None of this is to say that Stramel will be a star, go down as Minnesota's best possible use of that No. 21 pick, or even have a half-decent NHL career. That's uncertain, as it is with most hockey players drafted in their 20s. Sometimes, teams get "A GUY" in Eriksson Ek. But sometimes they get "a guy" like Jack Roslovic, and sometimes you get a guy who bounces around and never quite sticks like Colin White. Anyone who can identify exactly who will become what on Draft Day, or even one or two years past it, is probably lying to you.
We don't know where Stramel will end up next year, but the Wild would be doing a disservice to their top pick by not encouraging him to find some kind of fresh start. Whether that's getting on the same page as Hastings in Wisconsin, hitting the transfer portal to change schools, or switching to Major Junior, something's gotta happen because the status quo isn't working.
At some point, if things do not work out for Stramel, he will be the common denominator in a string of lost seasons. But at the very least, he deserves to get a shot in a situation that isn't actively undermining him before we make that decision. If he doesn't work out in five years, there will be plenty of time to re-litigate the 2023 draft. In the meantime, it just feels like a less soul-crushing path to hope he finds a place where he can click rather than pronounce within nine months of draft day.
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