If the Wild find themselves at the bottom of the Central, Bill Geurin should look for nice draft capital (at the price of taking on some garbage) from, presumably, contending teams for guys like Zucker, Brodin, maybe Staal as well, at the trade deadline. Two years down the road, Victor Rask and Jack Johnson will be reasonable buyouts, and in 3 years, Lucic could be. In the Seattle expansion, we'd probably go with the 7 forwards, 3 defensemen, and 1 goalie option, protecting:
With the chance the young forwards mentioned above and one of Eriksson Ek or Hartman prove to be worth holding onto, a earlier Milan Lucic buyout wouldn't be pretty for a few years, but may be something the Wild could live with. With that, big names left exposed (potentially) would be Staal, Eriksson Ek, Hartman, Foligno and Stalock.
Wild would be committing to probably around 3 years of disaster, but could hopefully add some nice draftees to a core of Dumba, Kaprizov, Boldy, Kunin, Donato, Fiala, Greenway, with aging, overpaid, yet hopefully still somewhat productive middle of the road guys like Parise, Suter, Spurgeon and Zuccarello still under contract. If their health remains in tact, I think Suter and Spurgeon could still round out the top-4 nicely.
That would be a pro gamer move by Rutherford if he could ditch Johnson for that little
Or he has compromising photos of Guerin.
He'd be ditching 4 years of a bad contract, picking up a reliable and affordable top 4 defenseman for 2 playoff runs and having Minnesota retain salary on top of that?
Surprised you chose not to move staal. If he has a healthy and productive first half of the season, he’d be an excellent deadline pickup (Winnipeg comes to mind here) and would fetch a solid return
McDavid, Connor
$250,000)
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