Short takes
• It's early and maybe Martin Hanzal and Ryan White will help lift the Wild to something special this spring.
But the problem with the trade deadline is good teams pluck players from losing teams.
Players on losing teams usually have losing habits, and Ryan White showed that when he quit playing to complain to a referee during the Blackhawks game last week and helped cause a huge goal against.
At future trade deadlines, GM Chuck Fletcher should probably avoid picking up players from Buffalo and Arizona, eh?
• Uh-oh, the pressure's on now. In the recently published Hockey News "Future Watch" edition, the magazine grades out every franchise's developing crop of prospects (not full-time NHLers).
Three of the 10 players whose stock has risen the most belong to the Wild: Kirill Kaprizov (unranked last year, 13th this year), Jordan Greenway (unranked last year, 36th this year) and Joel Eriksson Ek (23rd last year, fifth this year).
• With one press of a button, Ottawa's Bobby Ryan, tired of negativity from strangers, deleted his Twitter account.
"I had been thinking about it and my wife said, 'You're talking about it enough, so you should just do it,' " Ryan told tsn.ca.
Ryan had started to tweet less, but he still couldn't avoid being bogged down by haters.
"People ask about the negativity thing, but you can filter that as much as you want. I try not to engage because I'm never going to win an argument with a guy in his basement, so why bother?" Ryan said.
"You get nowhere with it. At a certain point, you can get it out of your life and not worry about it."
So, Ryan said: "I quit Twitter and started over. Now I'm an eggshell so nobody can find me."
