Better luck next year: A healthy Minnesota Wild team is pretty good

And now they might actually be able to build an actual team that is not severely limited by buyouts. And they have one of the NHL's best prospect pools. It is not a bad situation. Not at all.

Welcome back to Better Luck Next Year, a series that will focus on each team as they get eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. What went wrong, why it went wrong, what (if anything) went right, and what is next. We continue today with the next team to be eliminated from the Stanley Cup Playoffs: The Minnesota Wild.

The 2024-25 season was a tale of two teams for the Minnesota Wild.

There was the team in the first half that, at the halfway point, had the NHL’s fourth best record, top-10 possession metrics and a legitimate MVP candidate in superstar winger Kirill Kaprizov. That team looked outstanding and like a potential Western Conference contender, especially with a strong bounce back season from starting goalie Filip Gustavsson.

Then there was the team in the second half that went .500 over the final 41 games, saw its possession metrics tank and barely snuck into the playoffs thanks to a win in the 82nd game of the regular season.

Obviously, there were some highs and lows.

But the two different teams weren’t about just some arbitrary line in the sand at the halfway point. The team from the first half didn’t just suddenly go in the tank in the second half and forget how to play.

It was more about which version was the healthy version, and which version was the unhealthy version.

Minnesota ended up playing significant chunks of the season — and especially in the second half — without some combination of its top-two forwards (Kaprizov and center Joel Eriksson Ek) and three of its top-four defensemen (Jared Spurgeon, Jonas Brodin and Jacob Middleton).

Between the five of them, they combined to miss 140 man-games due to injury.

(And that doesn’t even get into smaller injuries, like Mats Zuccarello and Ryan Hartman each missing 13 games, Marcus Johansson missing 10 games, and so on — these were just the MAJOR injuries to top players).

In total, the Wild played just 13 games all season with all of Kaprizov, Eriksson Ek, Spurgeon, Brodin and Middleton all in the same lineup.

They went 9-2-2 in those games.

But it’s not just the fact they had injuries to those players or with without one or two of them for a few games. It was for a large chunk of the season that they were without two or three of them at the same time.

That’s difficult for any team to overcome.

It is especially difficult for a team to overcome when it opened the season with $14 million in dead salary cap money on its books due to buyouts and wasn’t always able to build out the team it may have wanted due to those constraints.

Despite all of that they still managed to make the playoffs for the fifth time in six years and gave Vegas everything it could handle in a six-game series that could have gone either way, with the last three games all being decided by a single goal (with two of them in overtime).

It would be easy to look at the way the Wild went out in the second half and not have high expectations for them going into the 2025-26 season. But if this team is healthy, and now that it has some actual salary cap flexibility to work with, there might be a lot to like about this team.

Let’s talk about it.