How to fix the Wild
That headline is misleading. I don’t actually know how to fix the Wild, short of petitioning the league to allow the team to play all of its remaining games at home.
I do know that the solution that most of up have come with involves firing head coach Mike Yeo or general manager Chuck Fletcher, or both. Now, Fletcher probably deserves to be fired entirely for the time he traded Nick Leddy for Cam Barker, one of the dumbest trades in Minnesota sports history that wasn’t orchestrated by Mike Lynn. But Yeo… I don’t know enough about hockey coaching to understand what is, and isn’t, his fault.
Is it Yeo’s fault that the Wild lose every single battle for the puck in their defensive zone?
Is it Yeo’s fault when then team can’t deal with even the mildest forecheck without being harried into making a bad pass?
Is it Yeo’s fault that even chipping the puck out to center ice is difficult for the team’s defensemen, never mind actually breaking the puck out?
Is it Yeo’s fault that the team’s forecheck is so terrible that dumping the puck into the zone is tantamount to just passing it directly to the opposition defenseman?
Is it Yeo’s fault that the team plays 49 different line combinations every night, and not one of them appears to contain two players who have ever met before?
Like I said, I don’t know. But I wish somebody could explain this to me.