2024 Draft Recap: Minnesota Wild
High-scoring blueliner Zeev Buium is the crown jewel of Minnesota's defense-heavy draft class
NASHVILLE (The Draft Analyst) — Those familiar with my work know how I feel about draft report cards, even if I’ve been guilty of feeding that beast throughout the last 10 years. But my thoughts on the latest 2024 results will be more than broad brush strokes, as pinning the rose on 12 uninterrupted months of in-depth analysis from both the team and prospect standpoints requires more than the standard letter-grade marking scheme acting as the rubric. Rather, draft hauls will be evaluated and labeled on the following criteria, which I think are both fair and reasonable:
Strong — Any four of potential franchise player(s) drafted; needs addressed; first-round caliber picks in the second or third round; multiple home-run swings in later rounds; point-producing sleepers; the majority of prospects were in top-line/top-pairing/starter roles (Ex. Buffalo’s 2022 draft)
Above-average - Any three of needs addressed; multiple home-run swings; acknowledged consensus favorites; the majority of prospects were in top-line/top-pairing/starter roles; making more with less; first-round quality in the second or third round. (Ex. Carolina’s 2023 draft)
Average — A solid first- or second-round pick but mostly unspectacular thereafter (Ex. Colorado’s 2020 draft)
Below-average — Quantity over quality; over-drafting of higher-round picks/reaching; four picks or less with no first-round selection; obsession with overagers (Ex. New York Rangers’ 2018 draft or Ottawa’s drafts from 2021-2023)
Poor — Any three of unpopular reach in the first round, no picks in the first or second round; needs not addressed, obsession with overagers, leaving upside on the board for projects, or bucking popular consensus choices (Ex. Arizona’s 2020 draft)
Video: Wild scouting director Judd Brackett recaps the 2024 draft
Outlook
For Bill Guerin, there is a good amount of digging remaining until he discovers light at the end of the tunnel. After a second consecutive inactive offseason due to nearly $15 million in dead space from the double buyouts of Ryan Suter and Zach Parise, the Minnesota Wild general manager has just under a year to go until he can breathe that long-awaited sigh of relief when the combined cap hit shrinks to less than $900K. Not that his hockey club hasn’t competed hard in the interim, as is evident in last season’s respectable 39-34-9 record despite the enormous constraint of extreme salary cap inflexibility. But the 2023-24 campaign ended with Guerin’s Wild on the outside of the Western Conference playoff picture for the first time since 2019, and neither he nor his predecessor Chuck Fletcher (literally) managed a roster that won a playoff round in any of Minnesota’s last seven postseasons.
Guerin knows he still has work to do, but his plan behind the buyouts went beyond removing two expensive veterans who were in the twilight of their careers. He wanted to get younger and fill the WIld pipeline with hungry neophytes who would push hard for NHL jobs sooner rather than later. Fast forward to the present, and Minnesota has more than a handful of the game’s top under-25 talents at the NHL while operating a top-tier farm system built almost entirely through the draft. The work done by the player development staff certainly deserves mentioning, as 20 NHL regulars from a season ago were originally drafted by Minnesota between 2008 and 2019, which comes to nearly two per draft for those keeping score at home, and all before Guerin and his capable scouting director Judd Brackett came aboard in 2020.
Part of this organization-wide success story is Guerin’s ability to stockpile early-round picks to augment his original allocation. In case you forgot, the Wild have not been in a rebuild in some time and it was only two seasons ago that they achieved consecutive 100-point seasons. And so while the Detoits and Montreals and Utahs of the NHL have been loading up on double-digit draft classes from selling off their veterans, Minnesota has opted for a quality-over-quantity approach — 20 of their 34 picks between 2019 and 2023 were taken from within the first three rounds for an NHL-best 59 percent majority. This is where the cap issues mentioned at the top should have positive second and third-order effects with potential strategic results, as Wild prospects on cheap entry-level deals were fast-tracked to the NHL for reasons other than their ability. Last season, 2020 first-round pick Marco Rossi had a 40-point campaign, and earning their first NHL promotions were four additional prospects drafted within the first two rounds since 2020, including all-everything center Marat Khusnutdinov, who did the unthinkable when he broke his KHL contract in-season to play for the Wild. Another inbound shipment of advanced weaponry should be expected at the end of the 2024-25 season, when the KHL contract of ultra-skilled 2022 first-rounder Danila Yurov expires and 100-point WHL’er Riley Heidt should age out of major junior for good.
Both Guerin and Brackett have mostly denied drafting toward addressing or strengthening specific positions, but ever their penthouse-level prospect showroom has its holes, specifically the lack of a pure power-play quarterback on the back end after the somewhat unsuccessful Calen Addison experiment and no viable under-25 goalie options in the AHL after stud 2021 first-rounder Jesper Wallstedt.
Still, the Wild aren’t afraid to draft along consensus lines and swipe high-end talent who were passed over by others for totally legitimate reasons like anti-Russian sentiment and fear of a sub-six-foot planet (insert sarcasm), which best explains why their pool is near-elite and their prospects tend to produce at the AHL and NHL levels. Of course, that wasn’t the case last draft when Brackett left skill on the board to draft big-body center Charlie Stramel with his first-round pick, but keep in mind that Stramel did fill a requirement and he was drafted in the 20s.
MORE: 2024 NHL Draft Report (PDF Download)
Traded picks
Every GM and scouting direction work in concert in one way or another, but Guerin’s faith in Brackett and his scouts seems more pronounced than the average tandem. To be frank, this is more of a gut feeling than anything else, but aggressive moves by the Wild on draft day have been frequent since Guerin took over in the late summer of 2020, and he rarely hides his enthusiasm for the picks his scouts make, often claiming that Brackett usually presses him to move or down depending on the situation.
Such was the case in 2020 when they traded up five spots in the third round to draft Daemon Hunt (arguably their best AHL defense prospect) and again in the sixth round of that year when they packaged two later-round picks to grab scoring winger Pavel Novak in the fifth. The following draft was one of their most prominent acquisitions via the trade-up, as Minnesota swapped spots with Edmonton from 21 to 19 to select a potential franchise goalie in Wallstedt, and all it cost Guerin to make it happen was an extra third he previously acquired.
Guerin began the 2024 draft with five of his seven original picks, missing only his third-rounder from the Marcus Johansen trade with the Washington Capitals on Feb 28, 2024, and his seventh from last offseason’s acquisition of winger Pat Maroon and C-list prospect Maxim Cajkovic from Tampa Bay.
As such, Minnesota’s five-year streak of drafting at least three prospects from either of the first two rounds was at risk, which along with already possessing a deep prospect pool increased the likelihood that Guerin would be willing to trade down with either one of his picks at 13th and 45th overall.
The men responsible for making this ever-important decision wasted little time ending speculation, as Guerin was easily convinced by Brackett to pounce on the opportunity to trade up one spot with the Philadelphia Flyers to corral a sliding Zeev Buium, the uber-talented defender who as a freshman led NCAA rearguards in scoring and won championships with Team USA’s under-20 squad and his University of Denver Pioneers. It was clear by the 12th pick that Buium had fallen because of his 6-foot frame in comparison to others, but Guerin had spoken highly of the California-raised blueliner on local sports talk radio before the draft, making it all the more rational and prudent to move a 2025 third-rounder to secure a top-flight prospect who was the best player available and provided Guerin’s pipeline the potential scoring machine the blueline was lacking.
There were no additional moves in either of the second or third rounds beyond Minnesota’s selection of first-round-caliber winger Ryder Ritchie with their own 45th pick, thereby limiting the Wild to only a pair of top-64 picks, albeit two on the higher end of the upside scale. Minnesota’s third-rounder from the Johansen deal, which previously transferred from Washington to the Montreal Canadiens in July 2023, would result in BCHL’er Logan Sawyer, leaving the Wild with the fewest top-96 selections since 2017.
Guerin made his second transaction of the draft early into Round 4, although it was more than the average Day 2 deal. Working with the Boston Bruins, Guerin sent his 110th pick and career minor-leaguer and local product Vinni Lettieri, who turns 30 in February, for the 122nd pick and 24-year-old winger Jakub Lauko, who appeared in nearly 70 combined games between the regular season and playoffs. But it was the player the Wild grabbed at 122 — Finnish defenseman Aron Kiviharju — that makes this mid-round deal worth remembering. Kiviharju, for those living under the Lake Hylia Bridge the last 24 months, once was considered a potential top-10 pick for this draft before twin knee injuries (and the fact that he’s a 5-foot-10 defenseman) effectively diminished his draft stock to apparently unforeseen levels. Considering the Wild got the higher upside in both Lauko and Kiviharju, it would be flat-out incorrect to label the swap as anything less than a win for Minnesota.
That would be it for the Wild in terms of draft-day dealing in 2024, but it’s important to note the final haul of last year’s deadline trade of popular winger Jordan Greenway to the Buffalo Sabres now reads Heidt (64th overall in 2023) and strong-skating defender Sebastian Soini, who Minnesota stole last month at least two rounds later than expected at 140th overall.
MORE: 2023-24 NHL Farm System Rankings and Assessments (Pre-Draft)
Draft picks
Assessment: Above Average
The Wild accomplished their usual draft-day requirements which are to add skill to the pipeline while strengthening perceived weak points by tapping into the strengths of the given draft class. Last year it was centers, this year it went skilled defenseman and goaltending. The lock-step mainstream echo chamber was probably gave Brackett and his scouts one of the higher letter grade because each of Minnesota’s first four picks were consensus darlings beginning with those given on the highly-distributed final rankings by NHL Central Scouting.
But at the same time, the Wild didn’t make the playoffs and came away with only three picks in the first four rounds, and one was Kiviharju, who looked scared shitless to take a hit in the SM-Liiga before he blew out his knee twice in a month. Ritchie also has been dealing with injury problems the last two seasons, although he played up to his first-round acumen whenever he was in Prince Albert’s lineup, as well as during his pivotal role for Team Canada at the end-of-season U18 world championships.
Buium is the obvious prize of this class, however, and understandably so. He was ranked sixth overall on my top-100 ranking after earning an 18th overall slot on my preliminary list way back in April of 2023. Although I don’t see most of the five bigger defensemen taken ahead of him becoming pronounced busts, Buium’s drop was reminiscent of another mini plunge by a playmaking defenseman on Draft Day ‘10, (coincidentally to 12th overall). Yes, I could only be talking about Anaheim’s Cam Fowler, who was a consensus top-five pick but was incorrectly passed over by half a dozen teams. As of today, Fowler is the top scorer among the entire class of blueliners and second only to winger Jeff Skinner in total games played.
As for Buium, there is talk that an NHL job could be less than two years away, probably because of his elite playmaking and stark improvement in one-on-one defense against heavier NCAA opposition during Denver’s march to the national championship (Buium also turns 20 a little over a year from now). But making the Wild lineup will obviously be dependent on him outperforming both his prospect peers and established veterans, which to me at this point seems like a toss-up. But both his style and size are similar to Norris Trophy-winning Adam Fox, who was drafted in the third round in 2016 and played three full post-draft seasons at Harvard before joining the New York Rangers at 21 and a half for the start of the 2019-20 campaign.
Ritchie is a pure right-shot winger who in terms of scoring potential automatically slots as Minnesota’s top right-wing prospect. He is neither the biggest nor the strongest, but he plays quick and fearless with an excellent shot-release combination that keeps opponents honest, especially on the power play. He’s played hurt each of the last two seasons which best explains his averaging of under a point per game in each of his two WHL seasons, but the Wild needed his skill set on a thin right flank. Ritchie should be considered a long-term investment whose return to full health should be paramount in his immediate post-draft development. He was ranked 42nd in my draft report so the Wild are a perfect landing spot for him.
Dipping into the Finnish pool was something Brackett only did once in his first four drafts with Minnesota, but both the playmaking Kiviharju and the shutdown Soini were clear-cut BPA types in the fourth and fifth rounds, respectively. Still, Brackett admitted afterward that positional need was considered, making it worth speculating that the Wild were going off different position-based lists for each round, otherwise, it would be one hell of a coincidence if each of Minnesota’s five Day 2 picks — three defenders, a goalie, and a winger — were clumped together on one consolidated draft board. Kiviharju also is a long-term project for reasons already stated, but he too is a power-play quarterback who before the season was considered superior to Buium. Soini is less risky in my opinion, as he is not only healthy but unlike Kiviharju actually held his own on the defensive end against adult competition and has an ideal frame and powerful stride. Both were confidently ranked in my top 65.
The Wild acknowledged then addressed their top-heavy goalie prospect situation later in Round 5 by drafting a high-upside option in Red Deer game-stealer Chase Wutzke, who was 17 his entire draft season. A second-round WHL bantam pick in 2021, Wutzke took over Red Deer’s starting job from 2005-born Rhett Stoesser and proceeded to swipe a Round One victory over high-powered Medicine Hat before a dirty hit by Saskatoon’s Easton Armstrong knocked him out for the rest of the playoffs. Size and insane post-save recovery are what you’ll get from Wutzke for now, but don’t be surprised if he’s invited to Team Canada’s world junior camp next season.
Adding aggression to the back end was accomplished with their sixth and final pick in the form of double-overage OHL defender Stevie Leskovar, who is a protective teammate with a real intimidation factor. But it was very un-Brackett-like to leave smarter, faster scoring blueliners like Artyom Shchuchinov, Daniil Ustinkov, and Tomas Galvas on the board, or even the explosive Frans Haara if Wild scouts were adamant about drafting a defender in his third year of eligibility.
Overall, however, it was another good Minnesota draft, even if positional need was evident throughout the process for a second year in a row. The Wild are one of several organizations with enough oomph in the pipeline and proven young stars at the NHL level to do whatever they please at the tables.
MORE: 2024 Draft: Round 1 Pick-by-Pick Analysis and Grades