By Justin Wiggins -
For almost their entire existence, the Minnesota Wild have been firmly stuck in the middle, on and off the ice. On the ice, it began with their first head coach, Jacques Lemaire, who continued his decades-long impressive resume as a coach but did so in a very boring fashion.
The Wild weren’t particularly fun to watch, even if their on-ice results were… okay. While the team was certainly more competitive at the beginning of the Zach Parise and Ryan Suter era, they could never find a way to make a deep run. Every year, the Wild were good enough to be talked about but never good enough to be taken seriously.
The Minnesota "Mild."
Even as their popularity has grown in recent seasons with the arrival of their first true superstar, Kirill Kaprizov, their inability to get past the first round further proved that the NHL world's jokes have some merit.
Always stuck in the middle. Never too good, but never bad enough either. Just… Mild.
All of that could change in the next month and a half. The Wild have a chance to be the hottest story in hockey and maybe, just maybe, every NHL fan’s second favorite team.
The roller coaster of a season has continued, with the latest hot streak vaulting the Wild back into contention for the Western Conference's final playoff spot. They find themselves just four points out of the 8-seed partially because of their 5-0-1 run. But the gap has also closed because the team occupying that final spot has found itself in a tailspin -- in an almost hilarious fashion.
The Vegas Golden Knights are sputtering. The defending champs are 6-9-1 since the start of February. Injuries have been a large part of that. However, in case you have been living under a rock for the past week and change, the Golden Knights made a flurry of controversial trades ahead of the trade deadline to boost their roster depth.
With Mark Stone and Alec Martinez on long-term injured reserve, they added big-name players like Noah Hanifin, Tomas Hertl, and Anthony Mantha at the beginning of March. Their strategy appears the same as it was last year when they won the Stanley Cup: add at the deadline, and when those injured players return for the playoffs, their roster will be deeper than every other team, allowing them to make a run at repeating.
Most of us know how these cap shenanigans work, but in case you need a refresher, Mike Russo of The Athletic had a behind-the-curtains interview with Vegas general manager Kelly McCrimmon this week. Simply put, there is no salary cap in the playoffs. By adding these extra players at the deadline and waiting to activate their injured stars once the playoffs start, the Golden Knights can enter the playoffs with a roster that far exceeds the CBA-mandated salary cap.
It's technically legal (for now), but that doesn’t mean every other team’s fan base isn’t throwing their hands up in disgust and demanding a change to the rules. While most hockey fans wait for such a change, there's no doubt a heavy rooting interest for someone in the West to catch the Golden Knights and prevent them from making the playoffs.
It’s the perfect opportunity for the Wild to pull themselves out of the mushy middle discourse of hockey takes and firmly plant themselves as everybody’s favorite team, even if for just a short while.
Nobody wants to see Vegas pull off their legal yet frowned-upon strategy and win another Stanley Cup, especially for a franchise most fans loathe due to their immediate success as an expansion team in 2017. While the story as a team of “misfit castoffs” was fun then, their over-the-top aggressiveness in bending the rules as far as they can have tired most people. Their most recent trade deadline shenanigans seemed to be the tipping point across the hockey world.
It’s the same sort of villainization of other pro sports teams that has turned the rest of the sports world against them that we’ve seen in the past. The New York Yankees had more money than everyone for a period of time. The New England Patriots were literally caught cheating. The Miami Heat started a super team that led the NBA into a decade of almost zero parity. Eventually, nearly every sport produces a villain in which every other fan base loathes.
And now, the Golden Knights are the new villains of the NHL. Only four points separate them from the Wild. One team is ascending while another is tumbling down the standings, and they also play each other twice in the final 15 games. The path is there for the Wild to rise up and overtake the Sin City villains.
The hockey world is clamoring for the Wild to humiliate the Golden Knights. For the first time in their history, Minnesota could become the second score every fan checks after their own team.
It’s time for Minnesota to actually do something, well, Wild.
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