Minnesota Wild: Is Cam Talbot the answer or an $11 million stopgap?

Cam Talbot is the Minnesota Wild’s biggest wildcard of 2020-21.

In 2019-20, the Minnesota Wild‘s goaltending was easily the team’s weakest link.

Running a three-man platoon headlined by Alex Stalock and Devan Dubnyk, the Wild’s goalies collectively amassed a 90.3 save percentage over the season’s 71 games. The trio were also the unfortunate owners of a 44.9 quality saves percentage, with Dubnyk’s woeful 32.1 QSP sinking down the team’s overall averages by a pretty considerable margin.

Though the Wild were still able to make it into the playoffs for the first time since 2018, in no small part because of the league’s adjusted bubble format, the team was handily bested by the Vancouver Canucks in a 3-1 Qualifying Round Series due in no small part due to Stalock’s sub-90 saves percentage on 116 shots.

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Needless to say, if the Wild wanted to take a step forward and really take a shot at being a top-four team in the NHL’s Central Division, they’d need to retool their in-net presence big time.

Monetarily speaking, they did just that.

With the goalie market flooded with potential options, Wild GM Bill Guerin stepped up to the plate and swung big; investing $11 million over the next three years on 33-year-old journeyman goalie Cam Talbot.

That’s… something.

Now, to be fair, Talbot isn’t a bad goalie. Since making his NHL debut with the New York Rangers in 2013, Talbot has blocked 91.2 percent of the shots taken on his goal, including 91.9 percent in 2019-20 with the Calgary Flames.

Talbot also has legitimate experience being a team’s number one goalie, as he started 55 or more goals in each of his three full seasons with the Edmonton Oilers from 2015-18. Did that tenure end particularly well? Well, no, the Oilers did trade Talbot to the Philadelphia Flyers for Anthony Stolarz after losing out on the number one goalie spot to Mikko Koskinen, but that had more to do with freeing up salary cap space than his poor play. Even if 2018-19 was a down year for Talbot, he still played like an above-average goaltender two for a team with playoff aspirations.

That, my friends, is the problem.

Even if Talbot immediately becomes the Wild’s best goalie when he steps onto the ice for training camp later this year/in early 2021, is he really good enough to be a team’s number one goalie? While swapping out Dubnyk for Talbot certainly is an improvement, especially if it puts Stalock into a more natural role as a goaltender two, couldn’t the team have found a better option for roughly $3.7 million AAV?

Well, maybe this isn’t about finding a number one goalie at all?

With Stalock only under contract through the 2021-22 season for the low-low price of $785,000 AAV, maybe the Wild really see Talbot as a quality, veteran goaltender number two and are really hoping that Kaapo Kahkonen, the team’s fourth-round pick in the 2014 NHL Entry Draft, develops into the sort of unquestioned starter the team has been looking for since Devan Dubnyk was actually good.

I mean, think about it. Kahkonen won the Aldege “Baz” Bastien Memorial Award in 2019-20 for being the best goalie in the AHL and played fairly well for the team in five NHL contests. At 6-foot-2, 223 pounds, Kahkonen has good size and great skills for a goalie, and at 24-years-old, he could remain the team’s top option in net for a very long time. After signing a two-year extension with the team in lieu of the 2020-21 season, the first year of which is a two-way, but the second is NHL-only, everything is shaping up for Kahkonen to become a fixture of the Wild at some point in the not too distant future.

If that happens, the Wild will suddenly have a great number one and number two option moving forward. But if Kahkonen struggles or continues to take a little longer to develop, the Wild may find themselves with another goalie platoon and no true hope down the line.

There’s an old adage in sports that says ‘if you have two quarterbacks, you have none.’ That phrase doesn’t necessarily apply to goalies 100 percent of the time, but it’s certainly better to have a number one than two number twos.

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For better or worse, the Minnesota Wild are a team in flux. With a dozen or so players being added, subtracted, or traded this offseason, there’s really no way to know how this current iteration of the team will work when they eventually take the ice in 2021 – especially if training camp is minimal to non-existent. With that being said, Cam Talbot may be the biggest question mark on the team’s entire roster, as he’s certainly an improvement over Devan Dubnyk, but how much better could define the team’s season.

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