On the Minnesota Wild …
Pierre LeBrun: Russo reports Jonas Brodin is expected to miss a month with a broken finger. This is why Wild GM Chuck Fletcher would be smart to keep his defensive depth together and deal with their expansion draft issues after the season.
On the Winnipeg Jets …
Darren Dreger: Think that Winnipeg ownership and management are committed to head coach Paul Maurice.
On the Vancouver Canucks …
Chris Nichols of FanRag Sports: Canucks GM Jim Benning was on TSN 1040 yesterday. He was talking about the possibility of trading a defenseman for a forward.
“So if we decide we’re going to do something – teams, when they call us, they look at our depth on defense and they ask about our defensemen. So if we are going to make a move to try to improve up front, it would be maybe with one of our defensemen.”
Benning was asked if them not wanting to trade draft picks, if it limits what they can do, or if he’s willing to change that philosophy for the right player.
“I talk to all of the GMs on a weekly basis,” said Benning. “We’re going to see what’s out there. If it makes sense for us in the long term… like, our short term plan when we took over here is we had to sacrifice some draft picks to try to add some good young talent to our group. We’ve done that with Sven Baertschi. Brandon Sutter, we had to include a pick to get him, but we thought he’s going to be a core forward moving forward.
“But I think now our philosophy has changed a little bit on that. We want to hold on to our picks because I have confidence we’re going to draft and develop our players well. We have enough good young talent, I believe, on our team now that we as we move forward we’ll just keep our picks and draft and develop the players we pick.”