Minnesota Wild: Was the Problem With the Players or Coaching?

After a disappointing end to a once promising season, who is to blame for the 2015-16 season of the Minnesota Wild, the coaching or personnel?  GM Chuck Fletcher seems to be betting that it was the coaching.

It seems every year the Minnesota Wild have several players who fail to live up to expectations. That is especially true when talking about players who are brought in and expected to put up points. The list of failed experiments is long, Setoguchi, Heatley, Havlat, and Vanek are just a few names that come to mind. What they all have in common is that once they reached St. Paul, their production went down the drain.

Is the issue the specific players didn’t play up to what they are capable of, or is this trend illustrative of a failure of the coaching staff and front office? After all, it seemed the systems were ill suited for the roster’s strengths. Add in the failure for prospects (who are now entering their prime) to improve in any substantial way, and it is fair to wonder whether the coaching was what has been holding this team back.

Certainly GM Chuck Fletcher is banking on coaching failure being the case. In addition to the hire of Bruce Boudreau, he has brought back largely the same cast of characters for next season. Sure he brought in two outside free agents, but the bulk of the roster has been left the same as years past. If Fletcher is right and the issue all this time has lied in the inability of the coaching staff to tailor the gameplan towards players strengths then this year has the possibility to be one of the best in recent memory.

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To put the lense on the players, there is also a case to be made that the players have not done their jobs as professional athletes up to the standards the team expects. An example of this is the seemingly yearly late December into January tailspin that kills any chance the club had at getting a favorable matchup in the playoffs.

It has also should be noted that there is a large divide between the older and younger players on this team, and there are rumors that the players quit on Head Coach Mike Yeo. So there is evidence to suggest that the current core of players is not capable of working together well enough to consistently win hockey games.

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Anyway you look at it, we are about to find out what has been wrong with the structure of this team for the past four years. Fletcher has given the players (minus Thomas Vanek) a second chance. He had better hope Boudreau can get more out of them than Yeo or Torchetti did because if he doesn’t Fletcher may be the next one out the door.