Nick Foligno isn’t treating this as a goodbye lap.
After the Colorado Avalanche knocked out the Minnesota Wild in the second round, Foligno waited for the kind of moment that would tell him he was done. It never showed up.
“I kept waiting for the moment of like, ‘I’m done. This is it,’” he told The Athletic this week.
“And it never really came. … I was more pissed, like ‘I want another crack at them.’”
That mindset is part of why Minnesota brought him back on July 2 with a one-year, $900,000 deal for his 20th NHL season. Foligno has played 1,287 regular-season games across six organizations, with 251 goals and 361 assists, but the Wild aren’t signing him for the box score. They’re signing him for the room.
Foligno has spent nearly a decade being the kind of player teams lean on when they want a culture set, not just a lineup filled out. Go back to the summer of 2016, when he had just finished his first year as Columbus Blue Jackets captain. That season went sideways fast: Columbus finished 34-40-8, fired Todd Richards after dropping its first seven games, and the Columbus Dispatch said Foligno had been “eaten alive by the responsibility of being team captain.”
Then John Tortorella called him in after the season and delivered a blunt message: “I don’t think you can do it.”
The issue wasn’t compete level. It was that Foligno cared too much about everybody else and not enough about himself.
Tortorella wanted him to be more selfish. Foligno took it to heart, and the next season Columbus surged to 50-24-8 and set the franchise’s best single-season points mark.
He also won the King Clancy Memorial Trophy and the Mark Messier Leadership Award, becoming the first NHL player to take home both in the same year.
That kind of track record is exactly why teams keep putting him in charge. He wore the C in Columbus for six seasons, the longest captaincy stretch in Blue Jackets history, and he also served as captain of the Chicago Blackhawks for the last two years. Chicago made him the 35th captain in franchise history and asked him to help guide Connor Bedard through his first years in the league.
The Wild know what they’re getting. Foligno’s scoring has naturally dipped with age, but Minnesota did not bring him in to chase points.
He’s a physical winger who can defend, kill penalties when needed and handle real minutes without needing the spotlight. The separator is the stuff that doesn’t show up in a clean stat line: the trust from coaches, the pull he has with younger players and the way teammates respond to him.
Minnesota’s veteran group is changing around him. Mats Zuccarello signed with the Los Angeles Kings, and Jake Middleton was sent to Calgary in the trade that brought Blake Coleman and Olli Määttä to Minnesota. Foligno didn’t brush that off.
"It's always tough - two room favorites, Zuccy and Middsy, absolutely loved by their teammates," he told The Athletic. "The hockey side and the personal side and teammate side - you really care about those guys and the influence they had on the room. That always hurts."
He’s seen enough turnover to understand how it works, and he’s not sentimental about the business side of it.
"Sometimes you need to do addition by subtraction," he said. "I've been on a lot of teams where sometimes new blood or changing up things does help spark some people and make them realize it's still a business and we haven't gotten to where we want to get to."
This summer, Foligno had other options. Other general managers called.
But Minnesota had something he couldn’t ignore. His brother Marcus has been with the Wild since 2017, and Nick watched from Ottawa, Columbus, Toronto, Boston and Chicago as the organization worked through cap problems and built itself into a contender.
When he arrived at the trade deadline last March, he felt the difference right away.
"I was really rejuvenated by playing meaningful hockey," he said. "That's my kind of hockey.
When the stakes are the highest, you understand who you are and don't get too overwhelmed by the moment. It came back like an old hat or old pair of shoes."
Then he made it plain how narrow the path was for him.
"It would have been hard for me to go anywhere else. In a roundabout way, it was probably Minnesota or nowhere."
Foligno also believes Quinn Hughes will come to a similar conclusion.
"Man, why would you leave here?” he asked.
“We're a great team. That's where the confidence comes from."
He added a message for Hughes based on what he’s learned from being around Marcus in Minnesota: "Hopefully he understands that this is a great team right now and has a window to win, and he can see that through."
As for whether this is the final season, Foligno isn’t saying. He doesn’t want a farewell tour, and he knows better than to pretend he can map out the ending.
What he does know is where he stands.
"Full well knowing I'm not stupid - 20 years in the league and where we are," he said. "It's a great opportunity for me on a great team to help push us over the top."
That’s the role Minnesota is asking him to fill as training camp approaches and the roster keeps shifting. The names around him will look different.
The expectations won’t. And in Foligno, the Wild have added a veteran who has made a career out of helping teams handle that kind of change without losing their edge.
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