The Minnesota Wild have plenty of reasons for fans to be excited about the upcoming season and one of the biggest is the continued breakout of Matt Boldy.
One of the best two-way players in the game, Boldy’s point total has increased in each of his first five seasons including a career-high 85-point campaign last season. After turning 25 in April, Boldy is considered one of the brightest young stars in the NHL and General Manager Bill Guerin set the bar even higher, predicting he could become a player that scores 50 goals and records 50 assists.
Mix in a team that is ready to become a championship contender and there’s a growing sense that Boldy could be even better next season and record a 50/50 campaign. But there’s also a chance the Wild’s overhaul in the top six could hold him back and keep Boldy from joining the club next season.
The Wild must solve their top six to help Matt Boldy have a 50/50 season
The Wild have undergone significant changes in their front six and lost a combined 150 points with the departures of Marcus Johansson and Mats Zuccarello and the expected departure of Vladimir Tarasenko. While Minnesota has found bargains before and are hoping to do so again with Bobby Brink stepping into a top-six role and Maxim Shabanov coming over in free agency, neither player has as big of a resume as the players they are replacing.
This gives teams a license to key in on Boldy and the rest of the Wild’s stars to open the season and it’s a situation that Boldy did not perform well in during last year’s playoffs.
While he scored six goals with three assists during the Wild’s first-round series against the Dallas Stars, an injury to Joel Eriksson Ek allowed the Colorado Avalanche to give Boldy extra attention. The result was one empty-net goal and three assists over the five-game series and an invitation for Boldy to hit the golf course.
This doesn’t mean that Boldy can’t learn from that series and if he replicates his production from last season while also taking a leap, Wild fans would gladly take it. But Boldy has set the standard of growing each year and if he doesn’t have the stats to go with that, there’s a chance we may have already seen the best of him in the NHL.
With that being said, a 50/50 season is within reach even if it’s not as automatic as some people believe.
Matt Boldy would join elite company with a 50/50 season
This is not to say that Boldy is a bad player. He’s a player that drives offense and makes his linemates better. He has slowly improved his consistency, making him a threat to score a goal and mix in an assist or two on a nightly basis and had Boldy not missed six games due to injury, he would have finished with 45 goals and 46 assists.
Another leap in his game – and two extra games to get there with the NHL’s 84-game slate beginning this season – could get Boldy to the 50/50 club, but it’s extremely hard to get there.
Since the NHL returned with significant rule changes after a lockout canceled the 2004-05 season, there have been 18 seasons where a player has recorded 50 goals and 50 assists. Leon Draisaitl owns four of those seasons and Alex Ovechkin has done it three times. In total, only 10 players have reached that mark in the past 20 years.
One thing that Boldy has on his side is that 12 of these seasons came for a player between their age-25 and age-30 seasons. But there are a lot of players that have come just short of the mark including his teammate, Kirill Kaprizov.
Kaprizov flirted with the 50/50 club when he scored 47 goals and 61 points in a career 2021-22 campaign. He was on pace to do it again after scoring 25 goals and recording 31 assists before suffering a lower body injury that limited him to 41 games during the 2024-25 season.
Health and a little bit of luck will play an important role in Boldy’s bid for a 50/50 season. But he’ll also have to do it in a Wild lineup that looks a lot different than last year.
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