Fantasy Impact: The Minnesota Wild have fired head coach Mike Yeo. Who does this help?

No new head coach has been named at this time.

Any time a coach gets fired it’s because things have gone so unsustainably badly that a team is likely to improve under the new coach because of simple regression, although there are things that a coach can do to help matters. For instance, Mike Sullivan has made some important line configurations that have helped the Penguins to drastically improve.

The Wild are in an interesting situation where their team PDO is 100.5 indicating they have had essentially near perfectly balanced puck luck so no amount of regression will help this team improve.

Instead, the Wild have seen the offense dry up after an early-season rush from their power play. Zach Parise and Ryan Suter spent time working with Adam Oates on power-play setups and initially it seemed to have worked. The Wild have since slipped to 23^rd in power-play efficiency at 17.4%. Also undermining the Wild, is their penalty kill that sits 22^nd in the league at 79.1%.

Whoever comes in as the new head coach has a very simple task: improve the team’s special teams. Accomplish that and the Wild can get back into the mix. How exactly the new coach goes about that will be interesting.

Maybe we see Suter removed from duties as the quarterback on the top power-play unit or perhaps some other change is made. Check out the most productive forward groups the Wild have used on the power play this season:

It is interesting to see Jason Pominville as the common denominator in the top three groups considering how much he has struggled this season. He sits eighth on the Wild with just six PPP this season.

One player who should get more of a look on the power play if the new coach plans on making an impression is Matt Dumba. Dumba has a five-game scoring streak snapped against Boston today during which he had scored with the man-advantage in each game. He sits fourth on the Wild in PPP with 10 despite seeing just 1:51 per game with the man-advantage. Yeo had recently been using Dumba much more frequently including giving him over four minutes of power-play time in each of the past four games. A smart coach would continue that trend.

Of course, Dumba is also rumoured to be a potential trade piece. However, perhaps transitioning away from Suter and towards Dumba is the best way to spark the Wild power play. After all, Suter has cleared 20 PPP in a season just once in his career and that was his last year in Nashville, one in which his defense partner, Shea Weber put home 10 power-play goals. Suter is great but for someone who has seen as much top unit power-play time in his career it’s amazing that he has just one season of 20 PPP or more. It’s possible that running a power play just isn’t his ideal use.

Look for Dumba or perhaps Jared Spurgeon (if the new coach likes him better) to see a boost as well as Parise and Mikko Koivu. Those two forwards are the only ones guaranteed anything in terms of heavy usage.