Dean Evason sounded more upset than ever after Sunday’s loss in Detroit, the Minnesota Wild’s seventh straight loss.
His team was running out of answers. He was too.
“We have to change something,” he said.
In the end the change was Evason.
The Wild fired Evason on Monday afternoon, hoping to provide a boost to a club that has lost 13 of its last 16 games and is sliding near the bottom of the NHL standings. Assistant coach Bob Woods was also fired. Woods, in his seventh season in Minnesota, was responsible for defense and a penalty kill, ranking last in the NHL with 23 goals.
Evason, who replaced the fired Bruce Boudreau late in the pandemic-shortened 2019-20 season, finishes with a record of 147-77-27 in parts of five seasons with the Wild — a .639 points percentage, sixth-best among the active coaches with more than 200 NHL games coached. He was 8-15 in the playoffs, losing in the first round three years in a row and once in the qualifying round of the Edmonton bubble after losing the interim title.
The Wild Blow Series leads in all four of its postseasons.
Evason’s contract has one year left (through 2024-25) and is worth a little less than $2 million.
“I am so grateful to have been given the opportunity to work with the Minnesota Wild organization, especially with the great fan base over the past few years,” Evason said.
While the Wild have not yet named a successor with the St. Louis Blues coming to town on Tuesday night, multiple league sources say former New Jersey Devils and Nashville Predators coach John Hynes will replace Evason and become the seventh coach in the story the wild will become. He was released a month after the end of the Predators’ 2022-23 season with one year left on his contract, also for just under $2 million.
He was a logical replacement. Wild team president and general manager Bill Guerin was Hynes’ GM for much of the time Hynes coached Wilkes-Barre, and Guerin’s senior advisor Ray Shero was New Jersey’s GM when the Devils hired him.
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In 602 NHL games over nine seasons with the Devils and Predators, Hynes is 284-255-63 (.524 percentage points) with a playoff record of 4-15 and no games won. In the AHL, he posted a 231-126-27 regular-season record with a 33-31 playoff record and two trips to the conference finals, and he was the league’s Coach of the Year once.
This entire scenario seemed unlikely when the Wild started the season, despite their lack of playoff success. After all, Guerin said in May that Evason was tied with one hand behind his back because of last season’s $12.7 million dead cap hit for buying out Zach Parise and Ryan Suter. For Evason, leading Minnesota to back-to-back 100-point seasons was certainly an accomplishment.
And if the buyouts were a hindrance last season, the $14.7 million in dead cap hits this season made things even more difficult.
Just last week, with the Wild reeling, Guerin publicly expressed his confidence in Evason in a Nov. 19 interview with The Athletic. At this point, Guerin wasn’t ready to blame Evason for Kirill Kaprizov scoring two equal goals this season (now), Matt Boldy being a shell of what he looked like in March, the role players, who didn’t score or convert any penalties, and goalkeeper Filip Gustavsson and Marc-Andre Fleury are simply not up to speed.
“There’s an old saying: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink,” Guerin said at the time. “I think Dean is doing a good job. And you know what? He can’t go out and play for the boys. He can’t have them executed. This is what they have to do.”
Guerin echoed the same sentiment after Evason’s firing. “Dean has done an outstanding job during his tenure with the Minnesota Wild, particularly as head coach of our team,” he said in a press release. “I am very grateful for his hard work and commitment to our organization.”
But as much as it seemed like Guerin was willing to let this season run out to perhaps give the team a chance at a top-five pick in next year’s draft, the mountain of losses could no longer be ignored . The Wild are facing a run of winnable games and the West is so beaten down right now that even collecting enough points to get into the mid-to-upper 80s could be enough to get into the playoffs.
That’s still doable for the 5-10-4 Wild, who have 63 games left, and Guerin hopes and expects a coaching change could provide impetus.
Remember, owner Craig Leipold said during preseason, “I think we’re going to have a better team than we did last year.”
There were reasons to fire Evason as the team continued to struggle with the same issues throughout the season. “That’s what makes you angry,” Evason said Sunday. It was the porous penalty kill that contributed to the team’s demise in the last two playoffs and is at 66.7 percent this season. There are the undisciplined and untimely penalties that destroyed a Wild team that had nights like Sunday when it controlled play at five-on-five.
Longtime NHL coaches usually benefit from a strong goaltender, and that’s another area that has faltered for the Wild this season, with a save percentage of .878, third-worst in the league, better than only Carolina (.873 ) and Edmonton (.877), which fired coach Jay Woodcroft earlier this month.
Plus, you’re only as good as your best players, and the Wild haven’t played enough of a role this season. Kaprizov, the two-time 40-goal scorer, has scored just six goals in his first 19 games and is minus-10. Boldy, who scored 31 goals last year, has scored just one goal in 12 games. “Some guys aren’t pulling their weight,” Evason said Sunday.
Evason has been more publicly critical of his top players this season than he was during his tenure in Minnesota. It was a sign that he had reached the end of his tether, both in his patience and in his work. Some of those meetings took place behind closed doors, such as when Evason and his staff challenged their three captains – Kaprizov, Foligno and Joel Eriksson Ek (as he wore an “A” for the injured Jared Spurgeon) – before practice on November 10th. The team rallied for a 5-4 come-from-behind victory the next night at home against the Rangers, a moment Foligno described afterwards as a “season changer.” Minnesota also won its next game on the road against the Islanders on November 7, but has not won since.
Guerin then gave the team a speech on Monday before their trip to Sweden for the Global Series that the players described as a “kick in the ass”: “Get yourselves together.” The former Cup winner has proven himself to them as both a player and a leader used, both individually and as a group.
“My biggest concern is our level of competition,” Guerin told The Athletic on Nov. 19. “And look, the guys work hard every night and it’s important to them. I know that. But it’s a different kind of competition and focus. I just don’t think we had it.
“It’s everything from face-offs and 50-50 puck battles to pure execution, positioning, spotting and passes from tape to tape. Everything has to get better.”
The Wild are 0-2-2 since then.
It’s much easier to change a coach than a roster, and that’s especially true for the Wild, who have a number of veterans locked up with no-trade or no-move clauses. Guerin’s decision to re-sign Foligno, Ryan Hartman and Mats Zuccarello in September looks even worse in hindsight because of the timing. They could have been valuable chips at the trade deadline if the season continued to slide. Now all Minnesota has to deal with is unrestricted free agents Pat Maroon and Brandon Duhaime, restricted free agent Connor Dewar and perhaps an underperforming, tenured player like Jake Middleton.
Firing Evason was Guerin’s last chance before the focus will and should shift to him. Guerin took over Evason as assistant coach, but without looking for a coach, took away the position of interim head coach from him and ultimately extended it for three years. The acquisitions of Parise and Suter were expected to buy Guerin some time, knowing their roster would be limited due to dead cap hits. However, the coaching change suggests that both Leipold and Guerin remain committed to making this a competitive team. A playoff team.
That seems like a long shot for a group that hasn’t been able to pick up a win lately despite performing better. It’s not just about the losses, but also what the Wild look like and what they say afterward. When a three-time cup winner like Maroon says on Sunday that the team needs to play with more “pride,” that’s a warning sign.
The Wild will now play under a new coach. This season-opening slide wasn’t entirely Evason’s fault. That may not seem fair. But to salvage this season, Minnesota needed more than just mending lines or player-only meetings.
Does Hynes’ hiring move the needle enough? That’s the card Guerin is willing to play.
(Photo: Brace Hemmelgarn / USA Today)