By Tony Abbott -
For the second straight offseason, Marco Rossi responded to the trade rumors swirling around him by making himself indispensable. In 2023, he trained hard to gain the speed and strength to propel him to his 20-goal, 40-point rookie season. After still having his name in the rumor mill this summer, Rossi came back to start hot, scoring five goals and 15 points in his first 19 games.
With 0.79 points per game, Rossi has the ninth-most points per game of any Under-24 Minnesota Wild player (minimum 15 games). The only players with better seasons at Rossi's age or younger are Matt Boldy, Marian Gaborik, Kirill Kaprizov, and Kevin Fiala. None of those names, as you'll recall, are centers. His age-22 season is shaping up to be up there with the top young centers in recent memory.
It's a smallish sample size, but here's where he ranks among 22-year-old centers in 5-on-5 points per hour since 2007-08:
- Sidney Crosby, 3.41
- Auston Matthews, 3.04
- Nathan MacKinnon, 3.00
- David Krejci, 2.99
- Robert Thomas, 2.93
- Connor McDavid, 2.86
- Jamie Benn, 2.76
- Brayden Point, 2.75
- Evgeni Malkin, 2.75
- MARCO ROSSI, 2.65
- Tyler Seguin, 2.64
- Leon Draisaitl, 2.67
- Matt Duchene, 2.56
- Claude Giroux, 2.53
- Mark Scheifele, 2.51
There's a phrase for centers this young, playing this well: Franchise cornerstone. Of these 15 players, only two have been traded, and that number drops to zero among the top-10. But even with this second breakout from Rossi, he's still back in the trade rumor mill. Rossi is No. 15 on The Athletic's first trade board list of the season, and Michael Russo is perhaps even more convinced he'll be on the move soon.
"I am still convinced that they are going to trade him," he declared on the latest "Worst Seats in the House" podcast. "I don't know when, I don't know if it's imminent, or by the deadline, or next summer. I just think that they do not feel that he's a player to commit to long-term....
"It just seems to me that, for a guy who's done everything they wanted -- skipped his sister's wedding, didn't participate in the Austrian Olympic qualifiers... He wants to win, he's a total pro. To cut ties with this guy at 22, and sometimes, in my eyes, treat him the way they are, I just think they're really gonna regret this."
Rossi's plight gets to a core belief of humanity: You can not escape your fate. The Greeks knew this thousands of years ago and wrote the play on it with Oedipus Rex. For a more contemporary example, Wild fans can turn to longtime defenseman Matt Dumba.
Dumba was here for 598 games, and about 450 were under the fog of speculation that he'd be the odd man out. Whether it was two expansion drafts or the many trade deadlines and drafts he spent on those trade rumor boards, NHL observers and Wild fans predicted a Dumba Doomsday with about the same accuracy as The Reasonabliists.
Maybe prophecy won't fail, and Rossi will be on the move, but maybe Dumba just passed the mantle along to Rossi. Someone whose name always pops up in the trade rumors without the supposed trade ever materializing. After all, Minnesota never traded Dumba, even though the rumors persisted until 2023, his final trade deadline with the playoff-bound Wild.
So, what happened with Dumba then, and why could the same thing happen with Rossi?
There's rarely one reason why a player does or doesn't get traded. However, if you had to pinpoint any one thing about the Dumba saga, it had to be that he was too valuable to ultimately part with. Look how the Wild went above and beyond to keep Dumba in the fold during the Vegas expansion draft. A double-digit goal-scorer was simply too valuable to lose for nothing, even if the alternative meant losing a power forward prospect in Alex Tuch.
Here's what people don't talk about in those expansion draft retrospectives: The Wild were right. Dumba put up 14 goals and 50 points in the next season as a nearly 24-minute per night defenseman. That's a valuable, valuable piece for any team's blueline. He was too good to throw away frivolously, even after his pectoral injury changed his career trajectory.
And perhaps as importantly, the Wild were too good to trade him for futures or less than equal value. Minnesota was competing for a Stanley Cup, needed a top center, and had a surplus of talent on the wing. They needed their version of Seth Jones for Ryan Johansen, and they learned that Johansens don't grow on trees. Or at least, when they sprout up, they don't get traded.
Starting next season, it's go-time for the Wild. The Zach Parise and Ryan Suter buyouts are (mostly) coming off the books, and rising expectations and pressure will replace them. Minnesota's not going to be able to take a step back in a Rossi trade; they'll need to get equal value that's ready to contribute now.
Look at the rest of that trade board, and ask yourself which names will be equal value? A struggling, pass-first winger in Trevor Zegras? A scuffling defensive prospect in David Jiricek? What's the point of getting a Bowen Byram when Zeev Buium may be ready to pull a Brock Faber and step in at the end of the year?
And if you don't like those guys... the rest of the list doesn't get younger.
There are few things more valuable in hockey than a young top-six center. Any Rossi trade for a non-center is, almost by definition, taking a haircut. The Wild spent years trying to square that circle with Dumba before and after his career-altering injury, and couldn't. And that was with a player with less positional value than Rossi.
Can Guerin resolve that problem? Who knows? Maybe Russo has the right read on the situation, and the Wild are determined to move on eventually. Or perhaps the Wild might want to do it but never find the right deal, and he stays in Minnesota and the rumor mill until his free agency, like Dumba did. Or maybe Rossi finds a way to escape his fate and stay in the Wild's long-term plans.
At this point, anything is on the table.
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