Good morning from Minneapolis.

As Brian mentioned last night, the Wild will take today off. And since it doesn’t play again until Thursday night in Phoenix, it wouldn’t shock me if some heavy-minute players have a light workload Monday at practice (maybe just off-ice) as well.

The Wild scored 26 goals in six games heading into the previous two. The team played a lot of hockey lately. Not making any excuses for the team, but the last two games, theWild looked like a team in need of rest. So these days off come at a good time for a flat group of players.

If you didn’t see, here’s today’s Marian Gaborik story. Basically, it’s a story on just how big of a pickle the Wild is in. It has a player who didn’t seem all that interested in signing anyway whose injury now prevents the team from trading him.

And quite frankly, it’s hard to believe the team would even consider signing him now. As I mentioned in the story, the Wild was interested in signing him when it thought his injury woes were history. They’re clearly not, and with the cap sure to come down, the Wild might be better trading Gaborik for some assets now and spending the money on a player (or players) that’s not such an injury risk.

Essentially, most the current and former NHL execs I talked to said the Wild better pray Gaborik comes back, stays healthy for a long time leading up to the March 4 deadline and plays at a high level so he can re-establish the market and the Wild can trade him.

Of course, the other side of that is, Gaborik has such a propensity for injury, can the Wild risk letting him play for a long time? From talking to people around the league, there was a market back in September, but then things died in October when it became clear this was a lingering injury.

Incidentally, I just noticed, the person half-seen immediately to Gaborik’s right at the Wolves game in the photo above the Gaborik article, that’s Tobin Wright. Who’s Tobin Wright? He’s a former Wild employee and an agent who works for Ron Salcer. He’s basically Salcer’s recruiter.

He’s also the person I wrote about today here. Wright’s been banned from the Xcel Energy Center event level. There’s a lot to this story that I can’t report yet, but it really has nothing to do with Gaborik.

But, to me, the thing that makes this most noteworthy? Wright is one of Gaborik’s best friends. They’re often together outside the rink. So the fact that the Wild feels comfortable enough to ban Wright and not be concerned at all about disillusioning Gaborik any further is just more evidence that this Gaborik situation is ugly with a capital U.

OK, that’s it for today. Stensaas has Monday’s practice, and I’ll be on the rest of the week during the three-game road trip.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 7th, 2008 at 10:19 am 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.