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Wild General Manager Chuck Fletcher will hold his season-closing news conference this week. That would be a good time to start asking how he will improve a team that has failed in the postseason during his tenure.
Today, let's take a moment to recognize that even some of his ill-fated decisions were understandable at the time as he tried to build a champion around two expensive players.
I'm not saying you shouldn't bring pitchforks to his house. I'm just saying you might not want to sharpen them.
The Blues' Mike Yeo was the better coach in the series and won in the arena of the team that had fired him 14 months before. This is a compelling story line and Yeo is an admirable character, but these developments do not mean that Fletcher erred when he fired Yeo.
That's the easy story, but it doesn't reflect the reality at that time.
Whatever the coach's personality or pedigree, when a coach loses his team, he must go. Yeo had lost the Wild locker room, or at least enough important players to make his position untenable. It's easy to taunt Fletcher with Yeo's success now, but Fletcher did not have an alternative at the time.
Bruce Boudreau was out-coached during the series and lost with the superior team. This does not mean that Fletcher erred when he hired Boudreau.
That's the easy story, but it doesn't reflect the reality at that time.
Boudreau was the best coach on the market. The Wild had to find a way to avoid its traditional midseason swoon. Boudreau was the best bet to accomplish this, and he did, to an extent. The Wild's swoon came later and ended more quickly than it had under Yeo, and the team entered the playoffs with a franchise-record points total and the second most points in the Western Conference.
It's easy to second-guess the hire now, but Fletcher made what was the right call at the time. He avoided hiring another rookie coach and went with the best veteran he could find.
Martin Hanzal was inconsistent and Ryan White was largely ineffective as members of the Wild. Hanzal made little impact during the regular season and was late to join the fray in the playoffs, before his sterling performance and big-time goal in Game 4 extended the series. This does not mean that Fletcher made a mistake when he traded for them.
That's the easy story, but it doesn't reflect the reality at that time.
Fletcher made the trade to set up Boudreau for postseason success. Hanzal would have come in handy should the Wild face the Blackhawks in the playoffs. It was Fletcher's job to prepare for that eventuality. As it turns out, the Wild did not face the Blackhawks and Hanzal and White were less valuable than expected.
Fletcher acquired what appeared to be quality talent and depth without giving up any of his top prospects. On a team with quality depth, the players he would have acquired with the draft picks he traded may not have had much chance to make an impact in the NHL.
Fletcher has much for which to answer. He has traded a remarkable number of draft picks. He might have overrated his own young players. He overrated Jason Pominville.
But most of his recent mistakes or misjudgments stemmed from managing an inflexible roster. His team has been too competitive to blow up, too competitive to acquire the kind of top-of-the-first-round draft picks that can alter the trajectory of a franchise, too invested in Zach Parise and Ryan Suter to rebuild, too highly paid to make major free-agent acquisitions possible.
Other than the acquisition of goalie Devan Dubnyk, most of Fletcher's trade-deadline deals have failed, but it's difficult to imagine the fan base being happy had he done nothing when he had a chance to bolster competitive teams.
Should Fletcher be fired? Maybe. It might benefit Craig Leipold to have a new perspective on his roster and the future. But the new general manager would face many of the same problems that restricted Fletcher.
The nature of his position requires Fletcher to take the blame for his team's failures, but many of his big decisions were logical in real time, as unsatisfying as that conclusion might be.
Jim Souhan's podcast can be heard at MalePatternPodcasts.com. On Twitter: @SouhanStrib. • jsouhan@startribune.com
