Matt Boldy has given the Wild plenty to feel good about, but the road to a 50-goal, 50-assist season may be bumpier than it looks.
Boldy keeps leveling up. His point total has risen in each of his first five NHL seasons, and last year he put together a career-best 85-point campaign. He turned 25 in April, and General Manager Bill Guerin has already pushed the conversation further, saying Boldy could grow into a player who reaches the rare 50/50 standard.
That kind of ceiling fits the optimism around Minnesota heading into the season. But there’s a catch: the Wild’s reshaped top six could make life harder for their best offensive pieces, Boldy included.
Minnesota has lost a combined 150 points from the departures of Marcus Johansson and Mats Zuccarello and the expected departure of Vladimir Tarasenko. The team is hoping to patch those holes with Bobby Brink moving into a top-six role and Maxim Shabanov joining in free agency, but neither comes with the same track record as the players they’re replacing.
That matters because if opposing teams can focus more heavily on Boldy and the rest of Minnesota’s stars early in the season, it could slow the kind of jump he needs to make. It’s not an abstract concern, either. Boldy already got a taste of that treatment in the playoffs last spring.
He opened the Wild’s first-round series against the Dallas Stars with six goals and three assists, but once Joel Eriksson Ek was injured, the Colorado Avalanche were able to zero in on him. Over that five-game series, Boldy managed just one empty-net goal and three assists, and Minnesota was sent home after that.
That doesn’t erase the progress he’s made. Boldy has become a reliable offensive driver who makes his linemates better and has sharpened his consistency over time. Last season, if not for six missed games because of injury, he would have finished with 45 goals and 46 assists.
With the NHL moving to an 84-game schedule this season, Boldy will have two more chances than before to chase the numbers. A bigger leap in his game, plus a little health luck, could put 50 goals and 50 assists within reach.
Still, that club is tiny for a reason. Since the NHL returned with major rule changes after the 2004-05 lockout, there have been just 18 seasons in which a player hit 50 goals and 50 assists. Leon Draisaitl has done it four times, Alex Ovechkin three times, and only 10 players total have reached the mark over the last 20 years.
Boldy does have one thing working in his favor: 12 of those seasons came from players between age 25 and age 30. Even so, the list of players who’ve come close is long, and Kirill Kaprizov is one of them.
Kaprizov nearly joined the club in 2021-22, when he scored 47 goals and finished with 61 points in a career year. He was also on pace again last season before a lower-body injury cut him to 41 games, after he had posted 25 goals and 31 assists.
For Boldy, the talent is there. The challenge is everything around it: health, timing, and a Wild lineup that no longer looks the same.
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