By Tony Abbott -
The Minnesota Wild are eliminated from the playoffs and playing out the string for the next four games while moving their focus to the future. After the Colorado Avalanche stomped out the last embers of the Wild's playoff hopes, The Athletic's Joe Smith asked coach John Hynes what was needed to make up the gap between them and the Central Division's playoff teams. Presumably, this is both head-to-head as well as in the standings.
Hynes laid out the goals for next year. "Some size, some speed, some depth," he answered. "When you look at the top teams in the Central, they're big teams, they're fast teams, they're deep teams. And they play a heavy game."
That sounds oddly like the kind of team Bill Guerin tried to build in Minnesota. "I think it's simple here: We're just not a pretty team," he told the media back in October 2022. "When we don't play hard, heavy, physical... we struggle. And when we are, we're good." Dean Evason, their former coach, preached the virtues of banging down low and getting hammered.
Minnesota could play that way because they had the personnel to do it. Joel Eriksson Ek and Marcus Foligno formed the core of that identity, but they had plenty of help. Jordan Greenway, Nico Sturm, and Brandon Duhaime were all big-bodied forwards who skated well, and contributed to the banging and getting hammered in the bottom-six while Minnesota's stars shone.
As the squeeze of the Zach Parise and Ryan Suter buyouts intensified, though, size was the first thing Guerin threw overboard to stay under budget. Minnesota traded Sturm to Colorado at the trade deadline in 2022, where he helped the Avs win a Stanley Cup. The next season, Guerin flipped Greenway to Buffalo for a second-round pick that became Riley Heidt. And once again, the Wild shipped size to Colorado in Duhaime at March's trade deadline.
Eriksson Ek and Foligno are still around, yes, and Ryan Hartman and Kirill Kaprizov will mix it up despite not being the biggest players. But that identity of heavy hockey, molded by and in the image of former, old-school power forwards like Guerin and Evason? That's gone.
It's gone, and more importantly, isn't coming back. The Wild don't have the cap space to add size on the trade or free agent market. Nor do they have a prospect pool that is equipped to replace players like Greenway and Sturm. Minnesota's top prospects -- Danila Yurov, Liam Öhgren, Heidt, and Marat Khusnutdinov -- all fall in between the 5-foot-11 to 6-foot-1 range. Big enough, but hardly the imposing team the Wild were two years ago.
It's easy to be a fatalist about Minnesota's lack of size. Looking at the NHL's average height and weight by team shows the Vegas Golden Knights at the top of those, and Minnesota way down in last place. Vegas is a lot better than Minnesota, so size mattering checks out.
Until you spend about 15 seconds looking a touch deeper. Look at that, the Cup-contending Avalanche are 28th in the NHL in average weight, just two pounds above the Wild. Their Central Division rivals, the playoff-bound Nashville Predators, who've eaten Minnesota's lunch for the past three years, are 24th. The going-nowhere New York Islanders and the cellar-dwelling Montreal Canadiens are the second and fourth-heaviest teams in the league.
If Colorado and Nashville play heavy -- and they do -- it doesn't seem like size is the main component in doing so. That's good news for the Wild, but not if they go out and try to chase the size they lost. Not if they try to impose their old identity on this new club.
What's Minnesota's identity now? Nominally, it's that hard-working, physical style, but again, they arguably don't have the personnel to embrace that anymore. More importantly, that hard-working/physical style shown by someone like Hartman reads differently to the referees. Minnesota's accrued the fourth-most penalty minutes in the NHL -- not bad for the smallest team in the league! -- and that's because players like Hartman have a reputation for reckless play. That turns heavy play into a liability pretty fast.
So what's left? The Wild are going to have to reorient their team around offensive punch to succeed in the future. They have one of the most lethal top power play units in the NHL with Kaprizov, Eriksson Ek, Mats Zuccarello, Matt Boldy, and Brock Faber. That top line of Kaprizov, Eriksson Ek, and Matt Boldy is good enough to be an identity in itself, in the way that Brad Marchand, Patrice Bergeron, and David Pastrnak set the tone for the Boston Bruins for many seasons.
Their incoming wave of prospects may not be the biggest or fastest crop of players, but they fit into the high-octane offensive mold of Minnesota's top players. Marco Rossi is 5-foot-9, but gets to the net like Eriksson Ek and has 21 goals (18 at 5-on-5) to show for it. Heidt is the kind of smart, heady distributor Zuccarello is today. Yurov surpassed Kaprizov in scoring as a 20-year-old in the KHL. Öhgren brings a combination of size, possession-driving, and dual-threat offensive ability that can remind you of Boldy.
If Minnesota can successfully bring those players along in a relatively quick fashion and have them be a 1B unit for their power play, they have a chance to have elite special teams. It can't hurt to have that influx of offensive skill at 5-on-5, either.
There's no shame in the Wild diverting from the identity of those Guerin/Evason teams. There might even be an upside to it. We've seen those Wild teams built on playing heavy hockey flame out in the opening round of the playoffs several times. How high was their ceiling? What did Guerin-ball get them, exactly? The Wild are at the start of a turnover that will be intensified as more of their most talented prospects start filtering onto the team. It's not time to impose an old, outdated identity on them, but to find a new mantra that adapts to their strengths.
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