Here is the Marian Hossa story . As you can see, the Wild tried hard to grab the superstar, even using Marian Gaborik to get it done. In the end, Hossa’s agent confirmed to me his client turned down a long-term deal with the Wild averaging more than $8 million a season to sign for one year in Detroit. Edmonton and Boston were also offering Hossa packages reported to be in the $9 million range, and there were a number of others.

Columbus Blue Jackets have signed Kristian Huselius at four years, $19 million.

Wild has contract offers out to a number of players. Huselius must have been what the Wild was waiting for because the front office headed home Wednesday night minutes after Huselius made his decision. 

I got a couple emails yesterday from readers, and I’ve seen comments in the blog the last couple days, demanding that the Wild spend to the upper cap limit of $56.7 million or the team will face fan backlash.

Look, spending to the cap ceiling doesn’t look like it’s going to happen this year, but it’s not because the Wild’s not trying.

It did everything it could to land Hossa, it tried for Olli Jokinen — and incidentally, these are just two things I know about and were able to report to you. As hard as I work to be as clued in as I can, there’s no possible way I can know every single thing the Wild is trying or has tried to do. So I’m sure there are things I don’t know about, and thus, you don’t.

But now that the Wild couldn’t get Hossa and Jokinen, it’s doubtful it’ll spend to the cap this season — and trust me, you don’t want them to. Think about this logically, reasonably just for one second.

It makes absolutely no sense to spend money just to spend money and conceivably hamstring the organization for years to come on lesser quality players and poor contracts. There are still some quality guys the team’s going after, and if it strikes out, I’m sure it’ll attempt some trades, but the list of names below are not stars by any means.

Do you really want the Wild to offer the cast below outlandish contracts to come here?

That would pay negative dividends for a long time, trust me. I’m not advocating the Wild not spend money. I know I don’t pay any hard-earned cash like you all do to support this team. But trust me, you don’t want them to spend to the cap just because it looks better to its fan base.

That’s not fiscally responsible, and you’ll see those negative repercussions if they do. The only way I see them even approaching the cap now is if it made a trade for a big-money player.

Now, I do agree, this team still has plenty of offensive holes and it better try to fill them, or this could be, let’s just say, an interesting season. 

I talked to Doug Risebrough Tuesday afternoon and the Wild has been on all the top forwards. I know they do have offers into Markus Naslund, Brendan Morrison. They have not inquired about Marty Straka, I’m told by his agent.

I’m sure there are many others they’re talking with.

Maybe the Wild can just sign the entire Naslund, Morrison, Bertuzzi line of yesteryear.

As I said yesterday, the Wild has a tremendous relationship with Naslund’s agent, but obviously it’s the players choice. And some reporters I talked to from Vancouver on Tuesday said Naslund didn’t want to make a decision on leaving there until he knew if countryman and pal Mats Sundin was coming. But now Sundin is indicating he won’t make a decision on Vancouver’s $20 million, two-year offer for some time, so maybe Naslund will accelerate his decision-making.

The Wild did talk to Pavol Demitra’s rep Tuesday.

Just looking at the free agency list, these are still some talents out there: Owen Nolan, Ladislav Nagy (Slovak ), Brendan Shanahan, Miro Satan, Josef Vasicek, Jason Williams, Trevor Letowski.

Some other intriguing vets? Mike Peca, Marty Lapointe, Stephane Yelle, Marty Reasoner, Curtis Brown, Byron Ritchie, Bryan Smolinski, Kevyn Adams.

Toronto continues to get slaughtered for its Jeff Finger, $3.5 million a year contract signing. Here’s a funny, and accurate, line from Hockey News’ Mike Brophy:

I bet if you put Finger in a lineup a week ago and asked (Cliff) Fletcher to pick him out, he wouldn’t be able to do it.

Here’s Broph’s column

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 7:47 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.