It was a crazy week for the Minnesota Wild. First, the Wild fired their head coach Dean Evason and assistant coach Bob Woods. The team then announced they hired John Hynes to be the next coach of the team. This was a move general manager Bill Guerin did not want to do, but had to.
The Wild were a team with expectations similar to the Edmonton Oilers. Minnesota had lost their previous seven games before the coaching change. The team looked lifeless and was not performing to their standard. Goaltending, defense, and top players not scoring goals were an issue for the Wild.
Where have you heard that before? The Edmonton Oilers. That was a big reason why the Oilers made a coaching change. But their problems went deeper than that. It seems right now the Oilers cleaned that up adjusting to Kris Knoblauch’s system. But the players also took responsibility for having two good guys be let go from their jobs.
Back to the Wild. Those defensive issues and lack of production forced GM Bill Guerin to change coaches. Guerin wanted to be patient with Evason, but the Wild continued to lose, thus the move to bring in Hynes.
“Hey, I had a conversation with Bill Guerin last week, Darren Dreger told TSN Radio in Toronto. “And, he literally threw it at the feet of his top players. They’re not delivering, they’re not executing our top-end guys, Kaprizov, Boldy, go down the list. They’re not getting it done. And he didn’t give any indication that he was on the cusp of firing Dean Evason. But guess what happens? You lose another game, you lose another game, ownership comes down and says, Yeah, we are we’re not doing that anymore. So we need to figure this out. And you make a coaching change.”
But as we see in both the Oilers and Wild cases, it was not just the coach. And in the case of the Minnesota Wild, the salary cap played an issue as to why this team is performing so poorly this season as well.
Go back to when Bill Guerin took over as general manager. He made a tough decision to buy out the contracts of Zach Parise and Ryan Suter. At the time, it was the right decision. To this day it was the right decision. If the Wild were going to move forward, they needed to move on from those two players.
Unfortunately for the Wild, those buyouts have hampered their ability to do business. Especially in a flat-cap world. Even if the salary cap had gone up and there was no COVID, the Wild would still be operating $15 million behind every other team. You can not as a team have sustained success starting behind the eight ball.
It was not a matter of if, but when those buyouts were going to hamper his ability to make hockey moves in the offseason. It started two seasons ago when the team could not afford to keep Kevin Fiala.
Fiala was such an important piece to the team’s offensive success. The Wild shipped him off to Los Angeles where he signed a massive deal. This past off-season, the Wild moved on from Matt Dumba. Though to be fair Dumba was probably not coming back anyway, but his presence on the blueline has been missed because of the injuries on the backend.
But instead of being able to sign top free agents, the Wild had to extend from within with players like Marcus Foligno and Mats Zuccarello. Foligno re-upped for $4 million a season, while Zuccarello signed for $4.125 million per season. Not to mention Matt Boldy is in the second year of a massive deal paying him $7 million a season.
Those contracts are not terrible for those two players, but it eats away at the salary cap quickly. Especially when they only acquired Pat Maroon from the Tampa Bay Lightning.
Things do not get any better for the Wild this upcoming offseason. It is the final year of the buyouts and dead cap space of Parise and Suter. Even with the salary cap going up, it will not help the Wild field a decent hockey team. Especially with teams like the Colorado Avalanche and Dallas Stars still Stanley Cup contenders in the Central Division. They will be stuck in the murky middle again.
Though Minnesota got the first game bump of the new coach, it might be best for them to rebuild to have sustained success moving forward.
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