For the last 23 years (13 with The Hockey News) Dobber and his team have reviewed each team from a fantasy-hockey standpoint and graded them. The 24th annual review will appear here on DobberHockey throughout the summer. This is not a review of the likely performance on the ice or in the standings, but in the realm of fantasy hockey both for the season ahead as well as the foreseeable future. Offensively, will the team perform? Are there plenty of depth options worthy of owning in keeper leagues? What about over the next two or three years? These questions are what I take into consideration when looking at the depth chart and the player potential on that depth chart.

Gone: Mats Zuccarello, Marcus Johansson, Vladimir Tarasenko, Jake Middleton, Jeff Petry, Robby Fabbri, Nicolas Aube-Kubel

Incoming: Blake Coleman, Olli Maatta, Maxim Shabanov, Calvin Pickard

Impact of Changes:

Minnesota went 46-24-12 for 104 points, seventh overall, on the strength of the fourth-best goals against (2.87) and the third-ranked power play (25.2 percent), while the offense sat 12th at 3.27 per game. The move that defines the roster happened in December, not July: Quinn Hughes arrived from Vancouver for Marco Rossi, Zeev Buium, Liam Ohgren and a pick (2026 first), then put up 53 points in 48 games as a Wild. Brock Faber, who had 15 points in 31 games before the trade, scored 36 in 49 alongside him. Kirill Kaprizov finished with 89 points and 45 goals in 78 games, Matt Boldy 85 and 42.

The summer, by contrast, was subtraction: Zuccarello (54 points), Johansson (49) and Tarasenko (47) took roughly 150 points of wing scoring out the door, and the external replacements are Coleman, a 35-point checker with one year left at $4.9M, and Shabanov, a one-year, $1.6M signing out of the Islanders organization. The Fantasy Guide‘s camp storyline is the race to become the new Zuccarello next to Kaprizov. The smart money is on Shabanov, who got defensive-zone minutes and no power-play time on Long Island; he is the Guide’s top breakout call and its boom-bust pick at the same time, with a 57-point sleeper tag at 20 percent likelihood. The prize is the fifth seat on a top power play built around Kaprizov, Boldy, Eriksson Ek and Hughes, four left-handed shots, so the call comes down to whether the Wild want another skilled winger in Zuccarello’s old spot or a right-handed look, where Ryan Hartman and Bobby Brink are the in-house options.

On the blue line the only change is Middleton out, Maatta in, part of the same July 2 trade with Calgary that brought Coleman. Everything else rides on health, since Joel Eriksson Ek and Jonas Brodin both finished the playoffs with broken bones in their feet. The injury bug is a standing risk with this group: Trenin was the only Wild skater to play all 82 games last season, and the Guide’s Band-Aid Boys list runs six deep (Brodin, Marcus Foligno, Brink, Eriksson Ek, Spurgeon, Maatta), so you cannot pencil anyone here in for a full season.

The crease is the bigger fantasy question. Filip Gustavsson (49 starts, .904) had offseason hip surgery that puts his readiness for camp in doubt, just as his five-year, $6.8M AAV extension begins, while Jesper Wallstedt posted .916 across 33 starts, took the net in the playoffs, and enters an arbitration-eligible contract year. The Guide puts Gustavsson’s starter confidence at 55 percent, and the July signing of Calvin Pickard for one year and $1M confirms the team is planning for an absence. Hanging over all of it is the Hughes contract: he is a 2027 UFA, the Guide frames the extension as a race with Cale Makar to become the league’s highest-paid defenseman, and as of mid-August nothing is signed, with Bill Guerin telling reporters the talks “take time.”

Ready for Full Time:

The graduation wave already crested in-season: Danila Yurov played 73 games, which graduates him, and Shabanov, with 44 NHL games, counts as an addition rather than a prospect. That leaves two names, and the report treats one of them as roster-ready.

Charlie Stramel is the headliner and the Fantasy Prospects Report‘s number 19 prospect, up from 265 a year ago. He was a Hobey Baker finalist at Michigan State with 44 points in 37 games centering Porter Martone‘s line, finished plus-29 while playing both special-teams units, and signed his entry-level deal despite breaking an ankle blocking a shot in the NCAA regional. The report’s instruction is “expect him to make the big club out of camp,” and the Guide projects 78 games and a 14-24-38 line with 47 penalty minutes. The comparable is Eric Staal, with a three-year peak projection of 21-36-57 at 25 percent upside and 90 percent certainty, and the Guide adds that if the adjustment goes well, he eventually centers Kaprizov.

Hunter Haight carries a this-fall tag at 145, but the report’s own advice is do not draft. Two points in nine NHL games across five call-ups, a checking-line profile, and a Chandler Stephenson comparable.

The tier behind them is thin because of the Hughes trade. Buium and Ohgren, the top two names in this section a year ago, are Canucks now, so the system runs on Stramel plus 2026 fourth-rounder Adam Benak, a 5-8 playmaker ranked 84th who is NCAA-bound and years away. Caedan Bankier is a cups-of-coffee tag the report says not to draft.

Fantasy Outlook:

Minnesota puts three names inside the draft list’s top 25: Kaprizov at 10 (96.3 projected points, first-unit power play), Boldy at 20 (89.1) and Hughes at 24 (86.8). The list then falls off a cliff to Faber at 171, Eriksson Ek at 202, Shabanov at 239, Brink at 253, Stramel at 256, Hartman at 267 and Coleman at 286. Run the Guide’s own projections through the team’s scoring ledger and the top three hold 36 percent of the points, a share only four teams reached last season, on a roster that had ranked mid-pack in scoring concentration for five straight years. In net, Gustavsson (22nd among goalies) and Wallstedt (24th) are each projected for about 40 games and 22 wins, a committee priced as a committee.

The percentage ledger mostly favors the roster that remains. The Guide’s read is that Johansson was the one Wild skater whose five-on-five percentages clearly overproduced, and he left for Sweden, so the regression risk emigrated with him. Marcus Foligno shot 4.8 percent at five-on-five and should rebound toward his usual 30-point range, and Ryan Hartman‘s 8.1 percent ran similarly cold, though his 35 points in his final 49 games already showed the recovery.

Two cautions cut the other way: Eriksson Ek’s involvement percentage has declined four straight seasons, which the Guide reads as a player being passed by the skill accumulating around him, and Kaprizov’s secondary-assist share hit a career-high 38.6 percent that is still low by league standards, evidence he drives his line rather than riding it. For category leagues, Yakov Trenin led the league with 413 hits last season and projects for 360 more, Marcus Foligno projects for 194, and Michael McCarron, extended in June for six years at $3.33M, is the Guide’s multicategory pick at 185 hits. Faber runs the second power-play unit and projects for 148 blocks.

The two-year view splits cleanly between the locked core and everything else. Kaprizov is signed at $17M through 2033 and Faber at $8.5M through 2032, while the 2027 free-agent class includes Hughes, Spurgeon, Hartman, Coleman, Sturm, Marcus Foligno, Bogosian and Pickard, with Wallstedt and Shabanov restricted the same summer. Keeper owners are effectively holding one binary: if Hughes extends, the Wild carry three top-25 anchors and a third-ranked power play deep into the decade; if he walks in 2027, the pipeline behind Stramel is too thin to absorb it, because the prospects who would have absorbed it were the price of getting him.

The top of the roster has never been better for fantasy: three top-25 picks, a full season of Hughes feeding Kaprizov and Boldy, and a rookie center the report compares to Eric Staal arriving out of camp. The grade drops a notch because the summer itself moved value the wrong way. About 150 points of scoring left, the returns were a checker on an expiring deal and a speculative Zuccarello successor, the crease opens the year as a surgery-clouded committee at 55 percent starter confidence, and one of the franchise’s biggest assets enters the season unsigned beyond 2027.

Fantasy Grade: B (last year was B+)

Check out the rest of the Dobber team previews here.