There has been a lot of talk surounding the Minnesota Wild after the big moves they have made this offseason.This may be the most intriguing season (lockout pending) for the Wild since we last won the Northwest Division a few years ago. I have seen many differant mock lineups posted and decided to take it a step further by playing around with average statistics for each player.

Below you will find my favorite line-up; which I believe is similar or the same to what Michael Russo has published, and the average stats for each player. A few notes: For most players I used only there injury free seasons (70+ games played)and usually shied away from their rookie years seeing as they are not rookies anymore aside from Granlund. Granlund was an interesting player to project so I first used his goal/assist averages in a typical SM-Liiga season and projected it over an 82 game season then I took that number and times it by .54, which is what I found on a website somewhere projected the strength of the league versus the NHL. The younger defenseman were tricky to project but I usually just took their most recent season and averaged it over 82 games. I wanted to get a more accurate projection for Scandella's progression so I decided to combine his AHL and NHL averages over an 82 game season and came up with a number that is fairly accurate for what we should expect.

LW C RW

Zach Parise Mikko Koivu Dany Heatley

36 G 39 A 75 P 20 G 44 A 62 P 37 G 42 A 79 P

Pierre-Marc Bouchard Mikael Granlund Devin Setoguchi

16 G 39 A 55 P 15 G 30 A 45 P 23 G 22 A 55 P

Matt Cullen Kyle Brodziak Cal Clutterbuck

15 G 25 A 40 P 15 G 20 A 35 P 15 G 11 A 26 P

Darroll Powe Zenon Konopka Torrey Mitchell

7 G 7 A 14 P 4 G 8 A 12 P 10 G 12 A 22 P

LD RD

Ryan Suter Tom Gilbert

7 G 31 A 38 P 7 G 25 A 3 2 P

Marco Scandella Jared Spurgeon

6 G 22 A 28 P 4 G 24 A 28 P

Clayton Stoner Justin Faulk

3 G 10 A 13 P 2 G 14 A 16 P

Goalie

Niklas Backstrom

55 GP 27 W 19 L 7 OTL 127 GA 2.42 GAA .918 SV% 5 SO

Josh Harding

27 GP 9 W 12 L 2 OTL 64 GA 2.65 GAA .916 SV% 1 SO

Cumulative averages

242 G = 2.95 Goals per game

191 GA = 2.32 Goals allowed per game

I feel these are fairly accurate stats for what we should expect from each player and team as a whole. The goalies were interesting because despite the injuries the past few years they still add up to average 82 games together so I believe a 2.32 GAA is something we should really expect next year. The Goals per game does look high mainly because Dany Heatley used to score 50 goals a year. Because of this you can expect about 10 goals less and maybe take another 10 goals from expected injuries and we are looking at about 2.7 goals a game. That number keeps us around the top 10 in the league in goals per game. I think the most important thing to take away from this is the fact that we are a deeper team and if injuries happen we can expect the Wild to maintain these averages better than in years past. Also, if some of these players don't live up to their averages other players may have career years and we will still finish with around the same numbers. Statistically speaking the Wild are a very intriguing team next year and this should prove that we belong in the playoffs seeing as those averages would put us in the top 10 in both goals and goals allowed per game, even if we don't live up to these numbers we are still looking to hover around the 15th best in each which should make us a playoff team.