The Minnesota Wild still have open holes in their starting lineup with the fourth line forwards still not identified. With Bruce Boudreau looking to have four scoring lines it seems that the Wild may have backed themselves into a situation they might not be able get the players on that fourth line to make that happen.
For all of you who are regular readers of the site I’d like to offer a quick apology up front. The following will be another story about the question marks the Minnesota Wild have filling out their fourth line…sorry. The change on this one though is the recent remarks by Bruce Boudreau and how that will affect the manning of that line going into the upcoming season. Boudreau has stated that his strategy will be to have “four lines that can score”, but right now the Wild seem to lack the forwards to make that happen.
On the other hand it seems that GM Chuck Fletcher shares a different assessment of the team’s forward depth. He seems to view a signing now as a roadblock to players possibly making the team that are already with the Wild organization. Michael Russo quoted Fletcher during Tuesday’s Wild Town Hall as explaining that “Before we sign anybody, I think we’d like to have a better idea of what we have internally. There are a lot of guys that either have played or on the cusp of playing, so I think we want to be careful we don’t box guys out.’
Boudreau wants to be sure that the fourth line is viable NHL-ready line. As he explained later in the town hall and was quoted by Russo as saying “I don’t want to go not being able to play the fourth line. I want to make sure are NHL-ready.” That might be a strong signal that Boudreau thinks the Wild’s choices are not necessarily NHL-ready.
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The Wild seem to be looking at some 3-4 forwards to fill 2 fourth line spots, and 1-2 depth spots. This means that seasoned AHL players like Zac Dalpe, Kurtis Gabriel, Tyler Graovac, Christoph Bertschy, Jordan Schroeder, and Zack Mitchell all will be looked at for a spot on the 23-man roster. Add in that it is highly rumored that prospects Alex Tuch and Joel Eriksson-Ek have a shot as well and you can see where the Wild have options.
The issue is that all of these options have not proven to be “NHL-ready”. Sure almost all of the of those AHL players have played time in the NHL, but the question is have they played well enough to be a regular member of the lineup? And with the younger prospects the question is much simpler, are they even ready to succeed at the AHL level much less the NHL one? The biggest roadblock to them making the team wouldn’t be a veteran player signed to a contract, it’ll be the fact that they are not ready or plain don’t have the skills to make the roster.
So to mitigate those questions I still think that the Wild will bring in one or two PTOs to training camp. It’s a virtually no-risk insurance policy that will ensure that if the younger players in the que right now don’t slice the mustard in the preseason and live up to the NHL-ready expectation, the PTO player will be that NHL-ready experience who simply just needs to be offered a low-risk contract.
The issue with PTOs seems to be is there really all that many great free agents to bring in? Of course there’s the Justin Fontaines, David Jones, and Ryan Carters of the world, but they don’t offer anything other than the same old mediocrity. And looking further out into the NHL’s UFA market it doesn’t look much better when you see that of all the available forwards the highest goal total last season by any of them is 11 set by David Jones with 10 by Lauri Korpikoski being the second most out there.
How can any of these players make the fourth line a viable scoring unit? Additionally, will any of these players be able to move up in the case of an injury. Sure Chris Stewart can be that move up player, but that leaves the fourth line even worse off. Add to that the fact that Stewart was an 8 goal scorer last season, so he’s not exactly going to be a one man scoring force.
So it’s easy to see that Fletcher has really failed to set up Boudreau with the four lines that he would like. Had he signed better free-agents earlier in the summer he might have gotten that one more quality player that would truly make the fourth line a scoring threat. This is not meant to be a “I told you so” about Matt Cullen, but had the Wild made the small investment in a player like him the fourth line might be more of a viable scoring unit.
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Finally, I’d offer up that Fletcher missed a huge chance to put his forward corps in a better place when he did not make a defense for offense trade. Right now there is a logjam of talent in the defensemen of the Wild. If one of the current starting defenders was to be traded, the Wild have Mike Reilly who played half an NHL season in 2016-17 and could have stepped in easily. Sure the defenders of the Wild are worth more than a fourth liner, but you could have picked up a higher line player and trickled down one of the other players. If Boudreau is going to roll four lines consistently it doesn’t really matter who plays on that line, they’ll get quality minutes.
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So heading into training camp it seems that the Wild front office has a lot to work to do to solve this forward gap. They have their eggs squarely in the young guy basket at this point, and that’s a shaky basket. Had Fletcher used all his resources and we got to this point, fair enough. But it just seems that he played this too conservatively. Will this sink the Wild season? Not really but it will make Boudreau’s job harder, and when you are trying to win the toughest division in the NHL that’s not a good thing.