The rumor mill is trying its hardest to make Jack Hughes available. The Minnesota Wild are desperate for a center. Their forward lineup got immensely worse, and they are relying on young players like Maxim Shavanov and Danila Yurov to step up in a huge way next season. Both those players are expected to be in the top six.
The Wild are insanely top-heavy. They have Kirill Kaprizov, Joel Eriksson Ek, and Matthew Boldy at forward. Those are all great players and would be players that most teams would love to have in their lineup. Great, now do the rest of the forward group.
Right now, their second set of forwards starts with Yurov, Shavanov, Ryan Hartman, and Blake Coleman. That’s… it’s not great. Coleman is a nice middle-six player, but the rest is just a complete hope and a dream.
Which is why the rumor mill has been desperately trying to tie the Wild to the superstar centers on the market and off the market. They’ve been tied to Dylan Larkin since he made the trade demand. Reports say that Larkin has the Wild on his very short list of teams he’d agree to a trade from.
And yet, the Wild can’t get a deal done. That’s because Steve Yzerman is asking Bill Guerin to trade them Team USA star Matthew Boldy in a Larkin trade. So, when Guerin can’t get one Team USA center on his team, many have automatically moved to another, but this one has another obvious tie.
Jack Hughes has been “tied” to the Wild for months. Since the Wild traded a massive package to the Vancouver Canucks to get Quinn Hughes, many expected that to be part one of an attempt to get all three Hughes brothers.
The Jack Hughes rumors have no bearing to them
Reports from earlier this offseason said Guerin tried to trade for Luke Hughes during the trade deadline, but then New Jersey Devils GM Tom Fitzgerald didn’t go for it (obviously).
Now, that same report is coming out that Guerin is “calling on” Jack Hughes. Technically, that’s probably true. He probably called Sunny Mehta and asked him what it would take to get the Devils' star player. The answer was probably “not interested,” and that was the end of that.
And here is where the games begin. The Athletic’s Michael Russo, who used to be a journalist, reports that Guerin made the call. The reason a GM would leak that information is to put pressure on the Devils in an attempt to make things awkward for a new GM and his star player.
Here’s the issue with such a bold move by Guerin: he’s trying to convince one of the best defensemen in the league and Jack Hughes’s brother to commit to the Wild long term. Both Jack and Quinn Hughes have a ton of respect for Guerin, as he was Team USA’s GM for the Olympics, and when Jack Hughes hurt his hand last year, Guerin called him and assured him he would still make the team.
That type of foundational respect doesn’t go away with rumor-mongering, but it doesn’t help Quinn Hughes feel comfortable re-signing with the Wild for the long run. The Wild got worse this offseason. That’s just factual. Guerin watched multiple important players leave in free agency while he waited for the Larkin trade to go through.
Now, Guerin is trying to use pressure to make something impossible happen. The Devils aren’t trading Jack Hughes. The reporting is truly a waste. One of the proposed deals has the Wild sending goalie Jesper Wallstedt, center Joel Eriksson Ek, defenseman Jonas Brodin, center prospect Charlie Stramel and a first-round pick to the Devils for Hughes. While the aggregate might sound like a good package, this move would send the Devils into a rebuild again. Any trade for Hughes would cost Boldy AND Eriksson Ek, which basically takes it off the table for the Wild.
The reality is that the Devils and Wild don’t fit for a trade unless the Wild get sick of the Quinn Hughes negotiations and send him where he actually wants to go. The fact that it’s July 12th and the Wild don’t have a deal done for Quinn shows that there’s a holdup. We understand why Bill Guerin is desperate, but maybe he shouldn’t be so obvious about it.
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