If this team was going to go through a re-tooling/rebuilding process like they currently are, I would have honestly rather kept Fletcher at the helm because he knew how to properly value our players. The issue with Fenton is that he evaluated our roster for half a season before deciding to blow it up and because he hasn't been here watching these players for the last 6 years, he got fleeced. I'm sure he got scouting reports and watched lots of film on our guys before deciding to move them, but every move he's made has been met with league-wide criticism. Realistically, we probably should have gotten close to two additional 1sts (in value) from our trades.
Now, we're in a very strange place as a team. The age gap between our players is very wide and while our younger players may be improving, they need to improve more than our older, aging vets are diminishing. This is what the current roster would look like, barring any UFA signing. I've included their age and handedness (NOTE: I'm just placing players in their likely positions, I don't care about line accuracy)
FORWARDS:
Zucker (27 L) - Staal (34 L) - Fiala (22 L)
Parise (34 L) - Koivu (35 L) - Donato (22)
Greenway (21 L) - Eriksson Ek (22 L) - Kunin (21 R)
Rask (25 L) - Sturm (23 L) - Foligno (27 L)
DEFENSE:
Suter (34 L) - Spurgeon (29 R)
Brodin (25 L) - Dumba (24 R)
Seeler (25 L) - Pateryn (28 R)
TRADED: Niederreiter (26 L), Coyle (26 R), Granlund (26 L)
As you can see, our forwards are now extremely young and we're relying mainly on 22 year olds to eventually replace our 1C, 2C, and 2LW. We're already relying on two of them to play on their offhands as 1RW and 2RW. There's one right-handed player in our entire forward line-up and there's absolutely nobody significant in our prospect pipeline that is a right-handed player. Speaking of our prospect pipeline, this team has absolutely nobody that is going to be capable of taking over our 1C and 2C roles unless there's drastic internal improvements in the next 2 years. Eriksson Ek looks like he'll be a middle 6 defensive center, but he isn't a player that I see as a Top 6 center. Kunin is more than likely going to be a RW, unless we go the Coyle route with him where he's shifted back and forth between the 2 positions so he can't get familiar with his spot. Rask was a buy-out candidate that we traded Nino for. Sturm is a UDFA that we signed from college and shouldn't be seen as a future Top 6 center. Our prospect pool is pretty much our NHL roster now too, so there's nobody that we should be expecting to come up from the minors.
Overall, the only way we're going to be able to get a competent center is going to be through UFA or trade, so it's a good thing that Fenton was able to shed a lot of cap because we are going to need to utilize that. Unfortunately, we didn't get enough assets in our trades that we could've used for a center acquisition, so UFA seems the most logical route because we can't be trading picks. The issue now, however, is when do you make that move and when do you try to be a competitive team again?
With our defense and our current Top 6 we're probably good enough to be a bubble team, which makes it awfully hard to rebuild since we don't get the opportunity to draft Top 10 players. If we wanted to go the route of a full rebuild, we should be trading Zucker, Staal, Spurgeon, Koivu and Dubnyk. However, we have the best defense in the league. In fact, the Wild have had the best xGA/60 for 3 straight seasons & we didn't even make the playoffs in this last season. Therefore, it makes you wonder if we should have traded away Nino, Coyle, and Granlund for younger players that are going to take a few years to be as productive because by the team they're reaching their prime, our team defense might not be as good and Parise, Koivu, Staal, and Suter definitely won't be.
Something definitely needed to change though because we couldn't just keep making the playoffs and being eliminated in the first round, year after year after year. Getting younger and more inexperienced may not have been the way to go for a team that still has the tools to be a competitive team though. In fact, I'd argue that Fenton did the worse thing he could've done by just half-committing to this rebuild. We became a worse team and we didn't even get a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd round pick in any of our trades. Fenton's pretty much forced himself into a position where he has to go out and sign someone like Duchene and hope that everything pans out because there's really not much else this team has to look forward to.
I personally think Staal and Zucker (maybe Dubnyk) should be traded for 2 1sts. With the loss of Staal and Zucker from our Top 6, we'd probably be pushed into the bottom third of the league, so we could tank for a season and hopefully get a Top 5/10 pick. Then, for the 2020-2021 season, we would have Kaprizov coming over and we'd have roughly $20M in cap space to sign (or trade for) Top 6 replacements. Our defense would still be really good (maybe even better if Brodin and Dumba improve more than Suter regresses) and our young forwards would have had a full season to adjust to the NHL.
TL;DR: Fenton's f***ing horrible and any Wild fan with half a brain would have this team in a better position right now.