MN Wild 2017-18 Official Thread

I’d hate to be the Seattle GM whomever that becomes…

ADDED benefit of Vegas making the Cup Finals, we get to see more of their EPIC opening sequences before home games!

rumor has it the wild made a decision on the GM, although it’s not official Paul Fenton

Russo says Paul Fenton. Presser tomorrow.

Everyone has to be happy for Las Vegas…Nevada…the State of Hockey and finally gets to the finals 12yrs….oops…months later.

What-A-Game last night! awesomeness! Game 7 woohoo! I’m pulling for Ovi

Tell you the truth, I won’t mind if Washington wins. They out played the Bolts pretty much every game. That and it is about time they delivered.

I hope there is a TV at Tropicana fields Papa John’s bullpen section. We have a company outing tomorrow.

Russo says new GM Fenton is tight lipped in the extreme, so we’re now in wait and see what he does mode.

Ruso also reports that Charlie Coyle pulled a Backstrom and had surgery on BOTH wrists. So now the most useless player on the Wild’s roster can’t be traded until he’s cleared to play. Great.

Grouse

Yeah, that was really irritating to read about Coyle. Honestly, if he couldn’t grip his stick, what was he doing out there? If the coaches and trainers didn’t know that is completely on him and his agent. He is doing himself and his team a tremendous disservice by playing hurt like that.
Obviously many people thought something was up. I was thinking he was still dealing with lingering issues from his broken leg.
I really want the guy to excel, but when things like this go down its pretty irritating.
Heatley was another one who waited well into the offseason for surgery too, though the Backstrom one was probably more glaring.
It seems to happen a fair amount. I understand with some of these injuries they have to try other alternatives, let swelling go down, get multiple opinions, etc, but I wouldn’t be surprised if something likes this gets brought up in the next CBA.

TheFamousGrouse wrote:

Ruso also reports that Charlie Coyle pulled a Backstrom and had surgery on BOTH wrists. So now the most useless player on the Wild’s roster can’t be traded until he’s cleared to play. Great.

Grouse

I heard the surgery was mandated by Bruce to finally get Coyle to stop “squeezing the stick”.

Boudreau: “My comment to John was, ‘I wonder if that’s why he couldn’t shoot or stickhandle the last half of the year,’ and he said, ‘Possibly,’”

tswoboda wrote:

Boudreau: “My comment to John was, ‘I wonder if that’s why he couldn’t shoot or stickhandle the last half of the year,’ and he said, ‘Possibly,’”

Well that would be ONE explanation. The other would be that he’s just completely useless and can’t find his stick with both hands anyway.

Deal his ass to a 3rd division team in Equador and move on.

Grouse

Hmm, we used to admire hockey players for playing through injuries and not making excuses when they do.

TheFamousGrouse wrote:

Ruso also reports that Charlie Coyle pulled a Backstrom and had surgery on BOTH wrists. So now the most useless player on the Wild’s roster can’t be traded until he’s cleared to play. Great.

I understand the frustration with Coyle but he didn’t pull a Backstrom. If I remember right, Backstrom had surgery right before the season started knowing he wasn’t going to see any ice time.

biggill wrote:

I understand the frustration with Coyle but he didn’t pull a Backstrom. If I remember right, Backstrom had surgery right before the season started knowing he wasn’t going to see any ice time.

Nope. He had the hip surgery the end of May in 2015.

mplspug wrote:

Hmm, we used to admire hockey players for playing through injuries and not making excuses when they do.

X2, but I guess that’s only when you like the player. Unfortunately Coyle is the whipping boy for IDO

Nope. He had the hip surgery the end of May in 2015.
[/quote]

This was thought to have been on purpose so the Wild couldn’t use a free buyout on him…

JoeMX1825 wrote:

This was thought to have been on purpose so the Wild couldn’t use a free buyout on him…

Agreed, or try and trade him, but his value wasn’t much at the time.
He ended up doing them somewhat of a solid by letting them trade him to Calgary later.

What a finish by the Caps! I think the Vegas dream ends in 5 games…Ovi gets his cup, happy for him…he’s a great example of an offensive superstar finally figuring out that a balanced defensive game leads to better team success…

The Caps have really turned things around. They played about as good as you could in this series, but still found themselves down 3-2. Vasilevsky was really stealing the show, but he did not have his best game last night.
Caps deserved the win and honestly they were the better team throughout the series.
This is shaping up to be a great Final I think. Some interesting story lines too with Schmidt now in Vegas. He was scratched many games, then left unprotected by the Caps only to be one of the playoff standouts. Will be interesting to see how he brings it against his old team.

JoeMX1825 wrote:

What a finish by the Caps! I think the Vegas dream ends in 5 games…Ovi gets his cup, happy for him…he’s a great example of an offensive superstar finally figuring out that a balanced defensive game leads to better team success…

Totally agree. That’s putting an ! on it.

I was thinking the same thing re the Vegas series. If the version of the Caps that were on the ice last night are the ones who show up for the series against Vegas, Elvis will be leaving the building and he won’t be holding the Cup.

I, too, am going to predict Caps in 5.

To be honest, I can’t find much to dislike about the Caps. Obviously, I don’t like that they aren’t all on the Wild’s roster, but other than that… OK, and Wilson, but there again I’d have loved Wilson to be on my team during the Jet’s series.

I’m already nervous about Fenton. Lots of talk about “little changes” and “tweaking” seems to parrot previous season-end statments from Leopold basically word for word. This already has me worried that Fenton was brought in to be Craig’s Yes Man rather than Mr. Reality. But at the end of the day, the proof is in the draft pudding. Can Fenton improve on the Wild’s awful R1 record? We’ll see.

Grouse

I’m taking the Knight in 6 games. The Jets are just as physical as the Caps and the Knights had no problem with them. I think Haula scores the game/series winning goal in game 6 too

I think we are going to see a series closer to the Knights vs the Kings. Low scoring and close games with a few OTs sprinkled into it.

I’ll take the Caps in 7.

I feel really good for Holtby too, he’s suffered through this stretch as well.

The greatest travesty would be the Caps finally having the confidence and losing to an expansion team made up of mostly young guys with chips on their shoulders. A city and team who metaphorically haven’t paid their dues, even if they have paid them literally.

Also, great season to the Bolts. I can’t wait to go see some games next year.

I wish Cooper had reunited Miller with Kucherov and Stamkos. Palat looked like crap on that line the last two games.

mplspug wrote:

I feel really good for Holtby too, he’s suffered through this stretch as well.

The way Holtby was playing in the 1st, I thought TB was going to win that game about 5-1. He was giving up the fattest, juiciest rebounds all period. Things settled down a little in the 2nd, but I really thought Tampa was going to pot 2-3 goals in the last half of the first to turn the game on its ear.

Grouse

Yeah the puck was there, but the players weren’t. I felt the same way before it unraveled.

So much for a low scoring affair

That last third of the 3rd was some fast, fun hockey to watch!

From the initial over-the-top theatrics on the ice before the game to the back-and-forth game itself, to watching thousands of fans cheer big screens on the strip with the sun still out, that was a ton of fun to watch.

That was as entertaining of a hockey game as you could ask for. Very good game, fun to watch. Hopefully we have several more games like that.

Per Russo, Nino, Zucker and Coyle all in the middle of trade talks. I don’t know anymore, that’s just the headline I see from FB, I don’t have an Athletic subscription.

Also the first round pick was questionable?

They picked a guy universally ranked in the 50s at 24. Another small Scandinavian too. Their sales pitch is that he’ll grow up to be Brodin. Either way it seems like they could have traded back and still gotten him and an extra pick. Not exactly something that’s going to generate a ton of excitement. Some people think the plan was to draft the Minnetonka kid and when he got picked right before us, we panicked and picked a secound round talent. I wonder if the GM search took so long that they didn’t have the draft board fully fleshed out, who knows though?

Well, I’m seeing more than a little Riseboro 2.0 in this new GM. He must really feel that he can see talent nobody else can see.

And I totally don’t get the strategy here. You pick a D man in R1, and then use your 3 R3 picks to pick centermen? Well, it makes sense to pick centermen, but why the hell no pick a BETTER centerman in R1, rather than a lower-rated D man with your first pick?

Also, when to we get to the “tweaking” this new guy has been talking about? Like tweaking Coyle’s useless @ss out of here?

I would hate to see Zucker go, but I have a feeling no team is going to go with a Nino/Coyle deal to get Coyle off our books, so it’s going to have to include dealing Zucker to get Coyle gone.

Another non-impressive draft for the Wild.

Grouse