Disaster strikes for the Minnesota Wild

Yesterday afternoon, the Minnesota Wild heard some tough news that could seriously hurt their playoff chances. According to Michael Russo of the Athletic, the Wild will lose both their top forward Kirill Kaprizov and starting goaltender Filip Gustavsson to injury for the next couple weeks at least.

Gustavsson will be out for the longer term as the team awaits results from an MRI confirming his injury, while Kaprizov will just miss 1-2 weeks. Gustavsson has a .902 save percentage in 22 starts this year, and Kaprizov has 13 goals and 34 points in 34 games.

In that timeframe, the weaker rest of the Wild roster could take a serious hit and hurt their already dim playoff chances. Of course, the Wild still have Marc-Andre fleury to turn to in Gustavsson's absence, but Fluery has also struggled this year with a save percentage of just .893. Offensively, there's no one else on the Wild who could possibly replace Kaprizov.


With these two critical players being injured, it'll be on the Minnesota Wild to at least tread water until their stars can return. As a fringe playoff team already, the Wild still had a chance to get hot and shoot up the standings past some teams like the Blues, Coyotes, or Kraken. Instead, these injuries could sink their next few weeks and make the season unrecoverable if some of the other playoff contending teams, like the Oilers, can widen the gap in the standings.