Chicago Blackhawks: 2019 NHL Draft grades for central division
Minnesota Wild
The Minnesota Wild are in one of the weirdest positions for any team in the NHL. They are in a similar position to the Blackhawks as far as you can’t really tell if they’re rebuilding or just trying to retool on the fly, except they have much less high-end skill then the Blackhawks do.
They have aging stars like Zach Parise and Ryan Suter but they are both still good players and they have some young players. It all fell apart for them in the second half of last season and they missed the playoffs for the first time in six years. They needed to have a good draft and they really did under the radar. They weren’t really discussed as one of the good draft teams this year but it was a solid draft overall.
They passed up on the best goal scorer in the draft in Cole Caufield who then fell to Montreal at pick 15. They did that in favor of Matthew Boldy, who was Caufield’s teammate on the United States National Development Program. Some think he fell and was a top ten pick, so it isn’t necessarily a surprise that the Wild opted to go with Boldy over Caufield. He is a two-way force that the Wild will try to build around. He will have a guy like Mikko Koivu to look up to for at least a few years, and Koivu has been one of the better two-way guys in the league for a while.
Their fifth-round pick Marshall Warren is a guy that was projected to go a little higher than he did so he might be a diamond in the rough for the Wild one day. Taking two goalies was a weird move that you don’t see very often, but other than that it was a pretty good draft for the Red and Green.