On Friday morning the Minnesota Wild announced that they were waiving forward Stephane Veilleux. If he clears at noon eastern time on Saturday the team is expected to assign him to the Iowa Wild of the AHL.
#mnwild places Stephane Veilleux on waivers. Would open up 2 spots if he clears
— Michael Russo (@RussoHockey) February 27, 2015
Michael Russo’s tweet might be phrased in a confusing way there. Veilleux only opens up one roster spot, but the team already has one vacant roster spot available and that’s how he gets to two roster spots.
Veilleux was unsurprisingly the team’s healthy scratch in Thursday’s win over Nashville. Despite injuries to Jason Zucker, Matt Cooke, and Ryan Carter, the acquisition of Sean Bergenheim in a trade with the Florida Panthers on Tuesday has made Veilleux expendable.
Michael Russo of the Star Tribune has speculated that having two available roster spots suddenly in the final moments before Monday’s 2pm central time trade deadline may be making space to bring in another player.
The team is in need of a third pairing defenseman at the moment. In particular, they need a left shot third pairing defenseman (which I have mentioned ad nauseam on Twitter since December, sorry). Outside of the top four, the team only has Justin Falk as a left-shot possibility. Since the injury to Keith Ballard the team has regularly been playing Nate Prosser on the left side in the third pairing, something they were apprehensive to do last year.
One of the names that Russo floating in his article was former Gopher and current Columbus Blue Jackets defenseman Jordan Leopold. We’ll have more about that possibility on the site later tonight. He started the season with the St. Louis Blues, but was moved to the Blue Jackets for a 2016 fifth round pick earlier this season.
Russo added in his discussion about potential defensemen the Wild could go after:
"The top two defensemen on the open market are considered Edmonton’s Jeff Petry and former Wild Zbynek Michalek, but Michalek has a concussion and Petry is a right-shot.Other defensemen potentially available include Philadelphia’s Kimmo Timonen (coming back from blood clot and hasn’t played all years), Carolina’s Tim Gleason, Buffalo’s Andrej Meszaros and Colorado’s Jan Hejda. Others, too, but those are the most well-known names and Leopold is the only one I know the Wild has inquired about."
The deadline is closing in and, like I said, we’ll have some discussion of the potential Leopold trade on the site later tonight.
For his part, Veilleux has played 12 games with the Wild this season, scoring one goal and one assist. He’s averaged 7:42 of ice time per game and logged ten penalty minutes.