Quoting: TanSor
Cap is extremely tight. I don't feel great about this roster outside of Kaprizov, Ek, Boldy, Brodin, and Faber, and it's almost impossible to make any moves to improve. I wouldn't be all that surprised if we missed the playoffs this season to be honest - unless Rossi has a huge breakout season. Thankfully we'll have a lot more flexibility next offseason with Zucc, Foligno, and Fleury coming off the books, but to be a broken record: we still need a #1 center that can score. To play revisionist history, the cap would have been a nightmare to figure out, but I think missing out on Eichel was a huge mistake.
I started messing around with an ACGM where the Wild sent Fiala/Rossi/2022 1st/2023 2nd to Buffalo for Eichel and it's.. not pretty.
In effect the Wild would be out: Rossi, Faber, Ohgren, Yurov, and Kumpulainen. I'd probably take that deal, especially since they'd still have Wallstedt. I left all the signings prior to Eichel's trade in place, so I removed guys on current deals they signed after like Gaudreau and Johansson. I bought out Goligoski to clear a little bit of cap and assumed Foligno would be traded somewhere for a pick to clear his cap and still only managed to have around $3.25m to fill 4 roster spots which included needing 1 forward, 2 defenseman, and a goalie to play with Fleury. And that's just for a 20 man roster.
I think if they had acquired Eichel, Boldy was going to have to be bridged for much cheaper instead of given his current deal, so assuming you could shave him down to like $4m for 3 years or something, you could probably make it work. As you said, a nightmare to figure out. I didn't end up publishing it because the Boldy extension would be the hardest to go back in retrospect and adjust to account for Eichel.