Surely It Will: Charlie Coyle
I’ve touched on this before; I’m all for trading Charlie Coyle whilst he offers value to the Minnesota Wild. But equally, I can see that he offers the team some degree of good value to keep, if he can up his game just a small amount.
Charlie sits behind Mikael Granlund and Jason Zucker on the depth chart, which is fair enough. He carries a cap hit of $3.2 million and is only on contract until the 2019-20 season. Another perfect case of being a slightly longer-term rental; let’s call it a rental plus one.
He’s reasonably big-bodied and produces well enough to be useful to a contending team should it come to that. You can expect about 40 points out of him across the course of a full season and generally effective play.
Why he seems the most likely candidate for a trade simply put is because of his value.
He isn’t going to do too much damage to a team’s cap hit, is still young enough at 26 to offer a reasonable guarantee not to suddenly tail off stats-wise next season.
That and he generally meets the needs of a lot of teams seeking a bit of depth that isn’t over the hill.
The higher price to pay over some other depth options may prevent any such deal happening, but I still rate it very much the most probable. Unlike a lot of his counterparts, there’s not a no-trade clause limiting the scope of where he can be moved.
The most interesting part here would be where he gets moved and whether it’s prior to the Trade Deadline or not. I guess that depends how the Minnesota Wild perform this year.