Unreasonable? You argued your case well in general, but I have to strongly disagree with that statement. Harding broke his foot in a freak incident, OK, but he was also shut down in the AHL because of MS-related complications again. So going into the season with Harding as your starter is what's unreasonable in my view. They had only question marks in net, in different sizes and shapes. If Fletcher was serious about competing, he needed to stabilize the goaltending no matter how tough the decisions he had to make. He chose to hope for the best, and chickens came home to roost.
I don't pretend it's an easy situation, but something needed to be done about it.
I wonder what the Wild's internal evaluation about Granlund's struggles is. It seems like many forwards on the team produce less than they should.
They should have signed or traded for an NHL goaltender and figured out how to dump Bäckström somewhere. Try to trade an asset with him to Buffalo, although I guess Bäckström would have blocked it because he would've just ended up in Rochester in that scenario. It all goes back to the decision to re-sign Bäckström long term. It's a 35+ contract so the cap hit stays even if the player is in the minors, which makes signing him long term even less defensible. But it was Fletcher's boo-boo, so he needed to clean it up. Fletcher did nothing. In the evenings, Fletcher kneels in a chapel somewhere asking for divine intervention so that a goalie goes on a hot streak ASAP.
You hate to see coaches being killed by goaltending. A coach can quickly lose buy-in when he doesn't get goaltending because losses drag down the morale of the whole team. It seems like the team would have to be at its best to get wins at the moment, and you really need to be able to win games even with a solid routine performance to make the playoffs. Yeo is probably in the other corner of the same chapel with Fletcher...