Wild announce multiple front-office moves

Wild general manager Bill Guerin announced Wednesday that Mat Sells, Michael Murray and Chris Kelleher have been promoted to assistant general manager roles. The team also promoted Matt Hendricks to GM of their AHL affiliate, the Iowa Wild.

The moves come after Guerin manned the Wild’s front office without a supplementary staff for most of the 2023-24 season. Director of team operations Andrew Heydt, who’d worked closely with various Wild GMs since assuming the role in 2014, mutually parted ways with the team in December after filing an internal complaint against Guerin alleging verbal abuse, The Athletic’s Michael Russo reported. An investigation concluded Guerin had not committed a firable offense and thus remained with the team, Russo said.

Kelleher’s promotion is the most notable. He’s been with the club for nearly two decades and will serve under Guerin as the director of player personnel for Team USA at the 2025 4 Nations Face-Off and the 2026 Winter Olympics. The 49-year-old joined the Wild full-time as a pro scout in 2009 and was eventually promoted to their director of professional scouting ahead of the 2019-10 campaign. He was again promoted to director of player personnel two summers ago, making this his third internal promotion in the past six years.

In his AGM role, Kelleher will maintain his scouting and personnel responsibilities. The team said he’ll support Guerin more closely with the trade deadline and free agency prep.

Sells will hold a more technical role, similar to his duties as Minnesota’s director of analytics for the past five seasons. According to the team, he’ll be responsible for “salary cap management, player contract research and negotiations, analytics and hockey strategy and Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) compliance.” Sells, who’s also been their vice president of hockey strategy for the past three seasons, did not have NHL front-office experience before joining the Wild.

Murray previously served as Iowa’s GM and Minnesota’s director of hockey operations, the former of which is being immediately assumed by Hendricks. Like Sells, the Wild is Murray’s first NHL front-office home. The former Dartmouth College forward joined the Wild as a special assistant to the GM in 2020-21 before being named the GM of Iowa the following season. His AGM responsibilities will revolve around assisting Guerin with day-to-day transactions.

Hendricks steps into his first GM role just five years after wrapping up his 11-year, 607-game NHL career. The former Capitals and Oilers fourth-line fixture also had a brief stop with the Wild in his final season, posting two assists in 22 games before being traded to the Jets and retiring in the summer of 2019. A Minnesota native, Hendricks returned to his home state in a front-office role immediately after retiring, now logging five years of service as their assistant director of player development under former Wild defenseman Brad Bombardir.