Minnesota Lands 15th After the Summer That Followed Its Blockbuster
Minnesota Wild's off-season ranking reflects Bill Guerin's key trades and achievements, including trading for Quinn Hughes and winning GM of the year.
Bill Guerin had a year almost nobody in his position has had. The Hockey News ranked the summer that came after it 15th.
Adam Proteau’s entry on the Minnesota Wild lays out the ledger. Guerin was the architect of Team USA and built the gold-medal-winning squad at the Olympics. He traded for one of the best defencemen in the world in Quinn Hughes. He capped the year by taking the Jim Gregory award as the NHL’s top general manager.
Then, in Proteau’s assessment, he followed it with a relatively mediocre off-season.
The gap between a year and a summer
This is the distinction these rankings exist to make, and Minnesota is the cleanest illustration of it available. An off-season ranking does not score the last twelve months. It scores June, July and August.
By that measure the Wild’s inputs were thin. Guerin used what little cap space he had to facilitate a trade with Calgary, bringing in Blake Coleman and Olli Maatta with the Flames retaining half of Coleman’s cap hit. Calvin Pickard, Maxim Shabanov and Justin Kirkland were the other additions Proteau lists. Coleman is 34, with 20 goals and 35 points in 69 games last season and the final year of a six-year, $29.4 million contract remaining.
That is depth. It is not the kind of move that moves a ranking.
The Hughes trade already did its work
The reason 15th does not read as an insult is that the Hughes acquisition was priced last season, not this one. Despite what Proteau calls a blockbuster, Minnesota could not replicate the Olympic success in the spring: the Wild beat Dallas in the first round and were then beaten by Colorado in a relatively meek second-round exit.
Other lists are warmer. ESPN’s June panel had Minnesota eighth. theScore had them ninth on July 4. The futures board sits them around +1300 to +1400. Those are all rankings of the roster. The Hockey News’s 15th is a ranking of the summer, and Minnesota’s summer was quiet because its previous one was not.
What is actually unresolved
Two things carry real weight into camp. Mats Zuccarello signed in Los Angeles and Vladimir Tarasenko departed, which leaves scoring to replace that the Coleman deal does not obviously cover. And Kirill Kaprizov, quoted at +1400 on the Hart board, is being asked to absorb a larger share of it.
The other live item is external. Dylan Larkin is reportedly seeking a trade out of Detroit, and Minnesota has been flagged as the club that would climb these lists fastest if it landed him. On a roster with limited cap space and a defenceman of Hughes’s calibre already in place, that is the move that would make the summer look different in retrospect.
Until then, 15th is a fair reading of what actually happened between June and August, and it says nothing at all about the year that preceded it.
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