The Wild Might Still Be Playing With One Hand Behind Their Back Next Year

Bill Guerin won the Stanley Cup twice as a player. He won his first with the New Jersey Devils in 1995 and another with the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2009. 

I will focus on the 2009 championship because it’s more recent and relevant. Still, that 1995 team was fun. It was in a lockout year, so the stats are funky. Still, Guerin was the third-leading scorer with 12 goals in 48 games. 

Behind him were:

• Tom Chorske, 28, who now does Minnesota Wild games on TV.
• Neal Broten, 35, who the Minnesota North Stars took in the 1979 draft.
• Brian Rolston, 21, who scored 96 goals for the Wild between 2005 and 2008.

Their goalie was 22-year-old Martin Brodeur. A 21-year-old Scott Niedermayer led New Jersey’s defensemen with 19 points, and Wild OG Jim Dowd was a 26-year-old center with five points in ten games.

1995 was a long time ago.

However, Pittsburgh started a trend in 2009. It created a blueprint Guerin should have followed after buying out Zach Parise and Ryan Suter in 2021. The Penguins ensured they didn’t waste a good crisis by rebuilding after a bankruptcy scare.

Pittsburgh had fallen on hard times after winning the Stanley Cup in 1991 and 1992. The organization had taken on debt to fund the championship teams and owed over $90 million to creditors. 

The Penguins filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1998. They owed star center Mario Lemieux $32.5 million, making him their largest creditor. He converted his debt into equity and bought them out of bankruptcy, taking control in 1999. 

Lemieux returned as a player and took Pittsburgh to the conference finals in 2001. However, the Penguins started a rebuild after that. They drafted Marc-Andre Fleury first overall in 2003, Evgeni Malkin second in 2004, and Sidney Crosby first in 2005. Together, they formed the foundation of a team that won three Stanley Cups.

Pittsburgh capitalized on hardship and built a dynasty.

Two years after buying out Parise and Suter, Guerin was feuding with the media after Minnesota’s fourth-straight first-round exit since he took over as general manager in 2019.

"I rarely bring this up, but I'm going to bring it up today because it's real and it's important," Guerin said. "I think our players and our coaches deserve a lot of credit because they're fighting with one hand tied between their back because of these cap restraints. 

“We don't apologize for it. We're fine with it."

That doesn’t sound like someone who was fine with the NHL’s cap penalty buyouts. 

Still, the NHL’s penalties were harsh. The Wild signed Parise and Suter to matching front-loaded 13-year, $98 million contracts when such pacts were commonplace. 

The league cracked down on those devil’s bargains because teams didn’t want to end up like the Penguins. They didn’t want to be in so much debt that their star players had to help them out of bankruptcy. However, it meant punishing owners who committed large salaries to star players to build a contender. 

Regardless, Guerin creatively framed his situation with the Wild. The league had tied one hand behind their back. How were they supposed to build a contender with $15 million in cap penalties?

Here’s the answer:

They shouldn’t.

The Wild should have gone young instead of building a high-floor, low-ceiling team.

Forget Marcus Johansson and Zach Bogosian. Give me Adam Beckman and Calen Addison. I don’t care if the team is inexperienced, defensively irresponsible, and some of these guys don’t belong in the NHL. Take that No. 2 prospect pool and elevate those guys as soon as they’re productive in Iowa. 

Let them sort themselves out. Play firewagon hockey! That 8-7 win over the San Jose Sharks in April? Give me more of that! 

Forget 2-1, grind-it-out games and first-round losses. Unleash madness!

Who cares if they have losing seasons and miss the postseason? They weren’t going to win there anyway. Losing seasons would mean higher picks, allowing the Wild to draft high-end prospects, ones Guerin could get excited about. The best ones will stick. They can move on from the rest.

Give me three losing seasons and one crazy cap-hell playoff run over three first-round exits in four years all day.

Look at the NHL’s other dynasties. How about that Chicago Blackhawks team that beat the Wild in 2013-14 and 2014-15, the last time Minnesota has been out of the second round? 

The Hawks overcame mismanagement to build a homegrown core:

• Patrick Kane: first overall, 2007
• Jonathan Toews: second overall, 2008
• Brent Seabrook: 14th overall, 2003
• Duncan Keith: second round (54th overall), 2002

Together, they won three Stanley Cups in Chicago.

This year’s Stanley Cup Finals teams are instructive. The Florida Panthers built their core by leveraging warm weather, low taxes, and Calgary and Buffalo’s mismanagement. However, as a high-tax, cold-weather team, the Wild should have followed the Edmonton Oilers’ model.

Edmonton signed Zach Hyman, but they drafted and developed the rest of their core:

• Connor McDavid: first overall, 2015
• Leon Draisaitl: third overall, 2014
• Ryan Nugent-Hopkins: third overall, 2011
• Evan Bouchard: 10th overall, 2018
• Darnell Nurse: seventh overall, 2017

The Wild leaned into director of amateur scouting Judd Brackett’s ability to grab fallers. They went with the dented-can theory on the draft, selecting players with NHL traits that teams passed on because of an evident flaw. 

However, Guerin looks like he’s out on Marco Rossi, who’s 5-foot-9 but had 60 points this year. What’s to say he’ll like the players the Wild drafted after buying out Parise and Suter? 

Here are Minnesota’s first-round picks since 2022:

• 2021: Jesper Wallstedt (20th overall) is a high-end talent, but they’ve already messed with his development. Carson Lambos (26th) is a 22-year-old defenseman who’s fallen off the prospect map.
• 2022: Liam Ohgren (19th) stands at a crossroads after registering five points in 24 games last year. Danila Yurov (24th) is a talented Russian winger the Wild hope to turn into a center.
• 2023: Charlie Stramel (21th) is 6-foot-3, 215 lbs. However, he only had 20 points in 67 games at Wisconsin before registering 27 in 37 games at Michigan State last year.
• 2024: Zeev Buium (12th) debuted in the playoffs this year. However, if Guerin has reservations about Rossi’s size, will he be willing to commit to the 6-foot-0, 183 lbs. Buium?

The Wild can’t change any of that now. They never got out of the first round after buying out Parise and Suter, and we don’t know if they landed any impact players in the draft. Still, if Guerin ends up uninspired with Minnesota’s dented-can prospects, that’s his fault. 

They could have used this time to ensure they had a homegrown core like Pittsburgh or Chicago. Instead, they tried to win in the playoffs with $15 million in cap penalties.

“I'm not trying to be a smart ass, Mike,” Guerin told Michael Russo in 2023 when he asked about getting out of the first round. “They're not going to put our name on the Stanley Cup to get to the second round. They're not going to give us a ring. 

“But you know what? That's not our goal. Our goal is not to make it to the second round.”

Read one way, Guerin accomplished his goal. However, he could have gone about it differently and given the Wild a better chance of eventually engraving their names on Lord Stanley’s mug. The Wild’s penalties end next season, but they may still be playing with one hand tied behind their back.