It’s expected that Saturday’s preseason finale will feature a roster pretty close to what we’ll see on opening night against Colorado. The Minnesota Wild took a step toward that end today when they sent seven players to Iowa and placed Brett Sutter and Curt Gogol on waivers with the intent of sending them to Iowa.
The team sent forwards Michael Keranen, Zack Phillips, and Joel Rechlicz, and defensemen Gustav Olofsson, Jonathon Blum and Justin Falk to the AHL. None of those names should come as a surprise. Important there is that all of them who need to pass through waivers have now passed through waivers already and won’t need to do that again for the next 30 days. That gives the Wild a little flexibility if they decide to change things up on the fourth line or the third pairing.
That also means that Matt Dumba, Christian Folin, Jason Zucker, Nate Prosser, Stephane Veilleux, Stu Bickel, and Cody Almond are all still with the team. The team will need to cut three more players to get the roster down to 23. That’s going to be one goaltender, one forward (remember, Justin Fontaine is injured), and one defenseman).
One of the three players getting cut is likely to be Ilya Bryzgalov who is with the team on a professional tryout (PTO). His presence was supposed to put pressure on the other netminders, but both Niklas Backstrom and Darcy Kuemper have performed well enough that signing another goaltender seems like a waste for the team who still has the injured Josh Harding on contract as well.
On forward it’s extremely unlikely that the cut will be Zucker. Almond makes some sense to stay since he plays both wing and center and can play penalty kill.
Defense is a little bit more tricky. After the team grabbed Nate Prosser off waivers yesterday, it seems like he’ll stay with the team, since they’d have to put him back on waivers to send him down and Fletcher said last night that they didn’t grab him just to put him back on waivers. That probably means that either Dumba or Folin is heading to Iowa. I don’t think anyone doubts their skills or that their upside is higher than that of Prosser, Bickel, or Keith Ballard, but the prevailing opinion seems to be that putting either of them in the NHL with limited minutes will only serve to slow their development. Putting one of them (likely a euphemism for Dumba) in Iowa will mean that the player gets a ton of minutes, including time on the top power play unit. If it doesn’t hurt the NHL team immediately, then the team might be doing right by the player and the team’s future. It’s not going to be a popular choice to keep Prosser and Bickel while a top prospect is sent down, but there’s some logic to the situation.
This will all be a lot more clear after Saturday’s preseason finale against St. Louis in St. Paul.