ST. PAUL, Minn. — Finishing with 87 points and missing the playoffs for only the second time since 2013 was not something anybody envisioned for the Minnesota Wild heading into the 2023-24 season, but when the front office and coaching staff sat down afterward to examine what went awry, it wasn’t hard to determine.
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Health was a major factor.
Captain Jared Spurgeon was limited to 16 games. Marcus Foligno missed 27 and played a heck of a lot more hurt. Jonas Brodin missed 20 games. Mats Zuccarello missed 13 games (12 to injury). Kirill Kaprizov and Freddy Gaudreau sustained rib injuries, with the latter affected by them all season. Pat Maroon was dealing with a back injury that ultimately needed surgery. Matt Boldy had an AC joint injury at the start of the season that clearly hampered him until around the time John Hynes came aboard, as he scored 28 of his 29 goals after the new coach’s hiring. Marc-Andre Fleury dealt with hip issues at the start of the season, and Filip Gustavsson dealt with groin issues before midseason. Jake Middleton needed offseason arthroscopic knee surgery.
The Wild weren’t using injuries as an excuse, but health was at the root of their issues.
But they dug deeper and inspected the penalty kill, which finished 30th in the NHL. Their goaltending left a lot to be desired. They got next to the lack of secondary scoring when Kaprizov, Boldy and Joel Eriksson Ek went cold. And they were way, way too easy to play against for a franchise that prides itself on being gritty.
It was that last part that Hynes and management agreed needed to be addressed this offseason after trading Maroon and Brandon Duhaime at the trade deadline. Down the stretch, the Wild were basically playing a fourth line full of AHLers.
“Our 9th to 12th forwards, we felt we had to have more of an identity — more speed, bigger, stronger, faster, guys that can play with an edge, guys that can tilt the ice, guys that bring energy,” Hynes said.
With salary-cap space limited heading into the offseason, Hynes explained that the Wild had to essentially choose which was the biggest priority to address around the draft and free agency: the need for secondary scoring or the need to make them harder to play against.
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They chose the latter for one big reason: They feel the secondary scoring will be easier remedied by the internal improvement of Ryan Hartman, Marcus Johansson and Gaudreau.
That’s why the month leading up to the draft, president of hockey operations and general manager Bill Guerin started to hint that the most important thing to tackle this offseason would be acquiring “identity” guys over a potential second-line winger.
Next thing you know, instead of signing somebody like David Perron, the Wild traded for Boston’s Jakub Lauko and signed Yakov Trenin to a four-year, $14 million contract.
On KFAN last week, Hynes indicated that his next few weeks will be that of a busy coach doing offseason “check-ins” with all his players, particularly those deemed to have had “down years” last season.
Hynes says much of training camp will be experimenting with line combinations in an effort to balance out the offseason.
In other words, just because the Kaprizov-Eriksson Ek-Boldy line was dominant for much of last season after Hynes made the decision to separate Kaprizov and Zuccarello, there’s a good bet we see Kaprizov and Zuccarello reunited for parts of camp. Zuccarello dried up dramatically away from Kaprizov, so perhaps we see a reunited Kaprizov-Hartman-Zuccarello line and a different winger with Eriksson Ek and Boldy. Maybe Johansson ends up there again. Maybe Liam Ohgren does. Who knows? It’s premature, but if that transpires, perhaps that potentially killer Trenin-Hartman-Foligno shutdown line looks more like Trenin-Marco Rossi-Foligno.
Obviously, there’s a lot of offseason left, so further changes could come. The Wild only have $1.531 million of cap space left, which doesn’t even afford two $775,000 call-ups. So any changes likely will require a trade.
But in a little more than two months, Hynes, who went 34-24-5 behind the Wild’s bench last season, will run his first training camp as Wild coach. Here are his thoughts heading into the next several weeks.
This conversation has been slightly edited for style and clarity.
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On the need to get tougher to play against
This year there were probably a couple areas we felt we needed to get better and one of them was, and I think we probably could all see it — you guys could see it even following the team, supporting the team, reporting on the team — that we needed to get a little bit bigger, a little bit stronger, a little bit faster, more pushback in our lineup. Maybe some guys that can aid in the penalty-killing element. Those were clearly things that needed to get better. We were able to execute that this summer. Would we like a top-six forward, some more secondary scoring? Sometimes those opportunities present themselves in the offseason, sometimes they don’t. But I think the most encouraging thing is that we were at least able to hit on one of the components that we were really looking to get better at.
We still believe in the guys. The guys that we have on the roster, they’ve got to be better. And I’m excited to have some conversations with guys now that our team is basically through free agency. Some guys that we need to produce or are going to have opportunities to be able to possibly play in the top six. Let’s have some discussions. Where’s your fitness level? Where’s your commitment level? Can you log those minutes? Are you coming into training camp with that mindset? So, I’m jacked because I think we were able to get our team better in a major component. And then now it comes into coaching in the summer here with these guys and having communications.
On Trenin
We were able to really hit on a component of our team that certainly needed to be better. We didn’t maybe think originally that internally that could be fixed, to get a 6-foot-2 forward that plays with an edge and is a top penalty killer and can score and is reliable and basically plays 82 games a year. We didn’t have that internally, so we’re able to get a guy like that. (Jakub) Lauko, he’s another player, and some other depth players that we signed to either help out in Iowa or contend for our team.
But the thing to me is when you look at some of the players that had down years, these guys are good hockey players. They’ve got pride. They care. We’ve addressed it. They’ve addressed it. We’re going to continue to work through that and have some conversations with those guys of the importance level of how good their summers are going to be, how we need them. And they need to come back too for the good of the team and for the opportunities to come in and have their best summer that they’ve had and get themselves off to a good start. Those are controllable things.
Then it just comes down to action.
On the importance of Hartman, who scored 14 times in his final 63 games and had his fitness level publicly called out last season
The reality of the situation is if you’re going to play with Kirill Kaprizov, you’d better be ready to play for 20 minutes. So your conditioning level, your intensity level (must be elite), if you’re going to play with top players, which we need. We’re trying to find someone to be in that mix. That’s what we continually talk about. But we believe that we do have, whether that’s Ryan, whether that’s Freddy, whether that’s Trenin, whether that’s Marcus, whether that’s Ohgren … we don’t know who that’s going to be. We have a lot of guys that we think have the potential to be able to capitalize on that role. But what does it really mean to be able to capitalize on the role? You’ve got to have the skill set, but also you’ve got to be ready to play and compete and do that night in and night out against hard matchups against the other team’s best players.
So, there’s a responsibility that comes with playing in that role. And that’s what we’re talking with our guys about this summer. Who is going to take that responsibility this summer and understand truly what we’re looking for? And who’s going to come back in that role? Who’s going to be the best player to fit that role? We feel like we have guys that can do it, which makes us excited. But there’s a responsibility and a commitment level this offseason to prove who that player is going to be. And there’s going to be an opportunity to do that.
The Wild only won five of their first 19 games last season and open this season with 10 of 15 on the road, including a seven-game road trip. How important is a fast start so you’re not chasing all year?
I think it’s awesome that we’re starting on the road. … (I’m going to) really communicate with guys now. Check-ins, conversations, expectations — I think those are all critical parts of the offseason and setting the stage for what we want to accomplish in training camp. Then I think when you get into training camp, we’re not worried about the regular season. We’re looking to have a really strong training camp, whether that’s our details, how we want to practice, how hard we want to play, how we want to compete. We’re going to push guys. They need to be ready for that and we’re going to communicate that clearly to them. And then at the end of training camp, if we master that, we’re going to set ourselves up when we think we’re in the best position to give ourselves a chance to be able to compete in a regular season.
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On line combinations in camp
We know coming into this training camp that there’s certain combinations that clearly work. But I also think that we do have some opportunities where I think competitiveness and creating a competitive environment in training camp is critical, particularly early in the camp. I’m not a big believer in you come in and, ‘OK, this is the NHL team and these are the lines we’re going to start the season with.’ I want to see guys compete. We need some spots to be filled. We need some roles to be filled.
Let’s say we put (Kaprizov, Eriksson Ek and Boldy) together, who’s hammering home with Rossi and Zuc? Who’s that guy? Let’s give some guys some opportunity. Maybe we put Zuc and Kirill together. Who’s going to go with Ek and Boldy?
So, I think that there’s some real competition in that part of our team that I really want to give guys opportunity to and push to. And these are the conversations we’re going to have with our players — (that) there’s nothing set. There’s no one guaranteed to be in that spot. The other part is you’ve got Ohgren, you’ve got Khusnutdinov, you’ve got Trenin, you’ve got Foligno. We’ve got some of the guys that we signed. And who’s going to make the team? I think if you’re going to be a good team and you’re going to get off to a good start, it has to start with a competitive mindset in training camp and guys win some opportunities and push each other. That’s how you can truly get ready for the regular season.
Can you be too top heavy if you stick with Kaprizov-Eriksson Ek-Boldy?
Well, I think you can look at it two ways. I think there’s a lot of teams that win in the league that have a dominant line like that. I think it’s incumbent upon if that line is together. You could arguably say they were at times, for a long stretch of time, the best line in the NHL — for other players to rise to the occasion to play a certain way, be more reliable, more consistent, more competitive, produce more offensively to complement that.
We know we do have that (Kaprizov-Eriksson Ek-Boldy opportunity). Can we also try to spread it around and change it? I will tell you this, whether we keep that line together or whether we split them up, we need more from some other people. And that’s our objective this summer, and that’s our objective to find that in training camp.
On fixing the penalty kill and how much Trenin and new personnel like Boldy will help
I think that with Jack (Capuano) coming in (as assistant coach) and Patrick Dwyer being there now, and I think with some additions to our team, (it’ll improve). More importantly, you’ve got to be able to change the mindset and have an emphasis on it — find the right way to do it. I don’t know what happened before we got here. I just know what happened in-season, and it did improve, but it wasn’t clearly good enough.
And a little bit like our team, there were a lot of ins and outs of … then things went awry. So to me, I don’t know how it was implemented or what happened prior to us getting here. But I do feel with the addition of Jack and Patrick and some of the thoughts that we have as a coaching staff, as well as the players, it’s incumbent on all of us, not just the coaches, the players also, to really dig into this and make sure that we’re giving it the proper mindset.
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On Ohgren, Khusnutdinov and Riley Heidt having a shot at making the team and players with NHL experience like Reese Johnson and Travis Boyd
We want to have it as a competitive environment. But are they going to beat players out? To get a job you got to take a job. … They’re going to get certainly as good of an opportunity as anybody else, particularly in training camp. And then I think you continue to evaluate from there.
(Ohgren, Khusnutdinov and Rossi) left good impressions. But also now you’ve got to do it again and you’ve got to do it again. And sometimes we get upset with certain players, say, veteran players that maybe have a down year. But they have a track record of being successful, and that’s what young players also need to do. If those guys come in and they look like they did when they ended the season, they’re going to push some people.
On finally getting to coach a healthy Spurgeon
I’m excited, not only for Spurge. I’m excited to coach the team again. Coaching against Minnesota, it was always a hard team to play against, difficult to play against, a team that was extremely competitive. In every game, playoffs, every year. And then when you get to know guys, like Brodin surprised me, (Brock) Faber surprised me, Boldy surprised me, Kirill surprised me. All of a sudden you get to coach these guys, and you’re like, “Wow, these guys are real players.” They’re great people. They’re excellent competitors. They do things the right way. And I really didn’t even have for the most part, Spurge and Marcus in those situations.
I just really like the makeup of the team. I’m excited to see Freddie come back. I’m excited for Hartman. I’m excited for Marcus Johansson. These guys are good players, they’re good people, they’ve got great track records as players. Things went awry last year for whatever reason. But I’m excited to work with them, I’m excited to coach them. I think the team’s going to be extremely competitive. And I know everyone’s going to put the right work in the offseason to give us the best chance to get out of the gates and have a great season.
(Photo: David Berding / Getty Images)
