Why would Minnesota do this?

Minnesota gets the more skilled and physical player in Lee to play with two undersized, non-physical players in Rossi and Zuccarello at the cost of his higher cap hit. He'd be a great net-front presence for that line.

How is Minnesota supposed to pay Faber and Rossi?

$13mil comes off the books from the Parise/Suter dead cap hits

It really not cap compliant this year. 21 man roster, and will likely bonuses to pay. The current edition of Lee isn't worth THAT much more than Johansson.

It could be a 22 man roster with a league-min forward and league-min defenseman instead of Hunt. Or you could just wait the short amount of time it would take to accrue enough cap space to bring someone else up. Even with everyone in the lineup hitting all their bonuses, that's less than $2.5M off of next years available cap space of about $28M.. not accounting for various roster moves that could be done next offseason like send Freddy to Iowa, trading Lee if he doesn't pan out, etc. Would trading a inconsistent bottom-6 winger and a 6/7 d-man for a possible top-6 winger be the most important move of Guerin's tenure? Not at all. It's not that difficult of a move to navigate cap-wise, though.

The Wild need to get stronger in there top 6 and if they don't think that Ohgren is ready this is as good of an option as I've seen. You could through in a late round pick to get NYI to retain a Million or so to solve the cap issue.