By the time you read this, Giannis Antetokounmpo might be on the move in the NBA. Crazier things have happened in the NBA, just in this calendar year alone. The Dallas Mavericks swapped Luka Doncic for Anthony Davis, for crying out loud! The Houston Rockets landed Kevin Durant in a seven-team trade. It’s the NBA. Anything is possible.
Ever since this summer, Bill Guerin has been hoping for this kind of franchise-changing opportunity to arise for the Minnesota Wild. But when Guerin asks the NHL if he could trade for a Giannis, the NHL GMs are quick to tell him that they’ve got a Like-New Giannis-quality player on their team.
Then that Giannis-type guy is someone like… Kiefer Sherwood. According to The Athletic’s Michael Russo, the Wild were in on him when the price was “a good, young prospect,” but apparently balked when the Vancouver Canucks raised their ask to “a good roster player” and/or a first-round pick.
It’s a bit too easy to dismiss Sherwood, now one of the hotter commodities on the NHL trade market, as a complete non-entity. He didn’t secure a regular NHL role until age-28, and his 12 goals this season are fueled by a shooting percentage of nearly 20%. He’s putting up OK numbers with the Canucks (12 goals, 16 points in 29 games), but that sort of thing happens when you give someone 17 minutes a night. Even for a last-place team like Vancouver, someone’s gotta score some points.
Sherwood’s got some of the red flags you’d associate with being fool’s gold in the NHL, but to call him that is not entirely accurate. Sherwood isn’t likely to score 30 goals (the pace he’s on, even after a recent slump), but he sneakily drives offense in the middle-six and loves to mix it up physically. Sherwood is second in the NHL with 124 hits this season.
Trading for Sherwood seems like a nice little bit of business, except that the Wild is a team basically built out of Kiefer Sherwoods. Obviously, they have star power in Kirill Kaprizov and Matt Boldy, but when you get past their top-six (when healthy), it’s hard to find players who aren’t some version of Sherwood already.
What’s the difference between Ryan Hartman and Sherwood, for example? How about Marcus Foligno? Or Yakov Trenin, who is the only player in the league with more hits than Sherwood?
Sure, Guerin has to work with the trade market in front of him, and that’s an NHL landscape, not an NBA one. The Wild could trade for Sherwood (who makes $1.5 million against the cap as a rental) without restricting other avenues of improving too much, and doing so is probably an upgrade over someone like Tyler Pitlick. Heck, Sherwood would likely be an improvement over the much bigger-name Vladimir Tarasenko.
At the same time, it’s very Weird (and Wild) that Guerin is looking to trade for the exact kind of player they always go out and get. Someone physical who can play in your bottom six and/or maybe move up if someone gets hurt?! That doesn’t sound anything like Justin Brazeau, Jakub Lauko, Pat Maroon, Ryan Reaves, Nic Deslauriers, or Nick Bonino!
Look at all the resources Minnesota has already put into building a bottom-six that tries to balance physicality with some offensive production. $4 million for Hartman and Foligno. $3.5 million for Trenin. That’s $11.5 million they spent on three Kiefer Sherwoods rather than, say, Nikolaj Ehlers, and $3 million to try to find the next Sherwood.
Now, look what they’ve gotten for it. Those three have a combined six goals in 77 games this season, have collectively been out-scored 15 to 22 when on the ice at 5-on-5, and have given the Wild minus-0.4 Standings Points Above Replacement, per Evolving-Hockey. That’s despite Trenin putting up 1.1 SPAR.
Is Sherwood going to help some team? Probably. But the Wild should be one of the teams that need Sherwood the least. They’ve paid three players more than double Sherwood’s salary to be that kind of player. If they’re still in need of Sherwood, something’s gone wrong — which the numbers for Foligno and Hartman would seem to indicate. If that’s the case, the person who made those extensions, despite them likely aging poorly, is looking to double down on more physical middle-to-bottom-six players in their 30s.
The Wild have had the same problem for 25 years now: They don’t have enough skill to win anything but a low-scoring slugfest. It’s hard to say what the solution is, but Guerin has spent years trying to throw more grit at this problem, and trading for Sherwood would simply be more of the same.