For the Minnesota Wild, this past season should be considered a learning experience; they had a lot of ups and a lot of downs. They had a coaching change plus a high number of injuries to several key players. All of these things were part of why they didn’t make the postseason but there are even more reasons that should be on a list of things to fix this offseason.
Many of these items that will be listed have been constant thorns in the side for the Wild since their inception back in 2000-01. Things like special teams, faceoffs, take more shots, amongst others. The first that comes to mind is their faceoffs or lack thereof and that’s where we’ll start this article.
Wild’s Faceoffs a Constant Struggle
They’ve had one player in their franchise who stood out for his faceoffs, and they’ve never had someone like him before or after. That player was Mikko Koivu. In his time, he took 19,290 faceoffs and won 10,354 of those for a percentage of 53.7. Even the Wild’s top faceoff guy at the moment, Joel Eriksson Ek, has only managed 3,432 faceoff wins out of 7,208 chances for a percentage of 47.6.
The Wild have to get better at faceoffs whether it means bringing in a player who can do that for them or finding a way to improve with the players they have. Realistically they should already be practicing faceoffs as often as possible, but they need to do something different. They won about 47.3 percent of their faceoffs which put them towards the bottom of the league and that can’t continue if they want to win games.
Faceoffs are crucial in both the offensive and defensive zone and even more so on special teams. I constantly use this as an example but when the Wild played the Dallas Stars in the 2023 Postseason, their penalty kill almost constantly lost faceoffs that put the Stars in prime position to score and they did. Faceoffs matter and the Wild have to be better next season. There is hope in their newcomer Marat Khusnutdinov but they can’t rely on him alone.
Wild’s Special Teams Have to Step Up
The Wild’s special teams are another area that needs consistent improvement. They had the players to be doing a lot better but for some reason, they couldn’t find success. Their power play clearly showed this despite being 10th in the league but they only scored 63 times out of 273 chances. While that is decent, they have the players to be better and had a lot of missed opportunities.
Most of the time, they passed too much trying to set up that…
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