Minnesota Wild GM Chuck Fletcher has already played his most trump card, pulling the plug on the Mike Yeo era and installing John Torchetti behind the Wild bench. It's the trump for any personnel executive to fire his coach because it serves notice to all the players on the roster that good isn't good enough and that anyone is - hypothetically speaking, of course - expendable. Unfortunately for the Wild, firing Yeo may not only have been the biggest card for Fletcher to play, but also the one he could play. Trades, it seems, are not so easy to come by in the 2015-16 NHL.
"It's difficult to make trades," Fletcher said recently, per Michael Russo of the Minnesota Star-Tribune. "And I'll also suggest that adding one player may or may not have sparked us, but right now we have a lot of guys that aren't playing to their potential. We need a lot more from the group we have."
Fletcher is absolutely right. The group he's assembled in Minnesota is talented, but they're also deeply flawed. Charlie Coyle is about the only player who has shown marked improvement this season - no one, not Zach Parise, Mikko Koivu, not Jason Pominville or Thomas Vanek has played up to snuff this season.
In any other year, a big trade may be the thing that kickstarts the annual Minnesota late-season run up to and into the playoffs. This year, that may not be the case.
The sagging Canadian dollar, the league-wide parity - no one wants to sell and if they do, they're either offering flawed assets whether in terms of play or contract or they're looking to get the most they can and driving a hard bargain on whatever worthwhile piece they're unloading.
But that may be the hardest truth for Wild fans at this point - one trade may not be the answer this year, because one trade won't fix what ails the team. Fletcher has work to do, and the two weeks before the trade deadline may not be enough time to get it all done.
