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With lottery help, Wild could pick as high as No. 3 in 2024 NHL entry draft

John Shipley, Pioneer Press
·3 min read

The Wild’s season ended Thursday, an anomaly for a team that had made the postseason in 10 of the previous 11 seasons. Yet Minnesota managed to keep one thing consistent this season:

They weren’t bad enough to earn a chance at the No. 1 overall pick in this summer’s entry draft. They could, however, get as close as No. 3, and the Wild haven’t picked that high since they chose Marian Gaborik third overall in the 2000 draft.

Despite a 5-10-4 start that cost Dean Evason his job, the Wild made a run at a playoff spot that didn’t officially end until last week in Colorado and in fact went 34-24-5 under head coach John Hynes.

After falling 4-3 to the Seattle Kraken in their season finale Thursday at Xcel Energy Center, the Wild will finish 20th in the overall standings with 87 points, one point behind the Penguins in 19th.

The Wild will be 13th in the Draft Lottery order with a chance to move as high as No. 3 in the lottery. The lottery will be held sometime in early May. In their 24-season existence, the Wild have never held the No. 1 pick in the entry draft and have selected in the Top 5 only twice, taking wing Marian Gaborik with the third overall pick in 2000 and Pouliot fourth overall in 2005.

Left wing Kirill Kaprizov, the only Wild player to score 40 or more goals in more than one season — three straight after reaching 46 with a power-play goal against the Kraken on Thursday — was a fifth-round pick in 2015.

After making the playoffs last season, the Wild picked 21st overall.

Goose gone?

Thursday’s loss was almost certainly Alex Goligoski’s last in a Wild sweater, and maybe the last in an 18-year NHL career.

“It could be,” he said. “It could be. Yeah, we’ll see.”

Goligoski suffered a broken leg in the team’s third regular-season practice — he was hit in the leg by a Jonas Brodin slap shot in Montreal — and was never really himself afterward. He played 12:56 on Thursday, blocking two shots and shooting three times, none of which was on net.

“I’m not gonna close any doors or anything,” Goligoski said. “I’ll take some time, keep thinking about stuff and just kind of go from there.”

A Grand Rapids native, Goligoski, 38, played in only 36 games this season, amassing eight assists.

“Bittersweet leaving ice last time in this jersey,” he said.

Role model

After failing to make the NHL roster out of camp and subsequently playing his second full season at the Wild’s AHL affiliate in Des Moines, Marco Rossi spent the majority of his summer in Minnesota working with Wild staff and players.

After adding 15 pounds of muscle, Rossi, 22, looked like a different player in training camp, made the team and scored 21 goals in 81 games, second only to Chicago center Connor Bedard’s 22.

But that isn’t all it did for the young center. The decision not to return to his native Austria after last season showed the organization that he’s a serious person with serious goals.

“It’s nice to see him get rewarded for it because he made, as a young player, the type of professional commitment that you need to make in the offseason,” Hynes said.

Hynes, in fact, said he’d like to see Rossi’s teammates follow his lead this summer.

“I think the big thing is he made a big commitment,” Hynes said, adding, “You know, he wasn’t traveling all over the place. It wasn’t a trip here, a trip there. He was here, training four or five days a week, training consistently, and that’s how you can really improve in the summer.”

Briefly

Marc-Andre Fleury was honored Thursday with the Tom Kurvers Humanitarian Award, given annually “to the player who best exemplifies leadership qualities on and off the ice and has made a noteworthy humanitarian contribution in his community.”

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