The Minnesota Wild keep getting dragged into the Jack Hughes conversation, but the noise says more about their own urgency than anything realistic on the New Jersey Devils’ side.
Minnesota badly needs help down the middle. That need only looks sharper after an offseason that left the forward group thinner, with young players like Maxim Shavanov and Danila Yurov expected to be pushed into top-six roles next season.
The Wild still have Kirill Kaprizov, Joel Eriksson Ek and Matthew Boldy, which is a strong core. After that, the picture gets shaky fast.
Their next wave of forwards includes Yurov, Shavanov, Ryan Hartman and Blake Coleman. Coleman gives them a solid middle-six presence, but the rest of that group is being asked to do a lot on hope alone.
That’s why the rumor mill has kept circling elite centers, both available and unavailable. Minnesota has already been linked to Dylan Larkin after his trade demand, and reports say the Wild are on his very short list of teams he’d accept a move to. But a deal hasn’t happened, because Steve Yzerman is asking Bill Guerin to include Team USA star Matthew Boldy in any Larkin trade.
So the chatter has shifted to another name with a built-in Minnesota connection: Jack Hughes.
Hughes has been “tied” to the Wild for months, and that link only grew after Minnesota sent a massive package to the Vancouver Canucks for Quinn Hughes. Plenty of people immediately saw that as the first step toward trying to bring all three Hughes brothers together.
There’s also a report from earlier this offseason that Guerin tried to pry Luke Hughes away at the trade deadline, only for New Jersey Devils GM Tom Fitzgerald to shut that down.
Now the latest version of the story is that Guerin has been “calling on” Jack Hughes. That kind of call is probably real in the most basic sense: a general manager checks in, asks what it would take, and gets told the player is not available. That’s where it usually ends.
But the leak itself is part of the game. The Athletic’s Michael Russo reported that Guerin made the call, and the point of that kind of reporting is often to put pressure on the other side, especially when a new GM is trying to manage a star player’s future.
The problem for Minnesota is that this kind of maneuvering can cut both ways. Guerin is also trying to convince Quinn Hughes to commit long term, and both Jack and Quinn have a lot of respect for him. Guerin was Team USA’s GM for the Olympics, and when Jack Hughes hurt his hand last year, Guerin called him and assured him he would still make the team.
That history matters. But rumor campaigns don’t exactly make a player feel better about the direction of the roster, and Minnesota’s offseason has already left the Wild worse than they were. Multiple important players walked in free agency while Guerin waited on the Larkin situation to resolve.
As for Jack Hughes, the Devils are not trading him. One proposed deal had Minnesota sending Jesper Wallstedt, Joel Eriksson Ek, Jonas Brodin, Charlie Stramel and a first-round pick to New Jersey, but even that kind of package would amount to a reset for the Devils. And if the Wild were serious about landing Hughes, the price would reportedly have to include Boldy and Eriksson Ek, which effectively shuts the door.
At the end of the day, the two teams just don’t line up for a Jack Hughes trade unless Minnesota gets so frustrated with the Quinn Hughes process that it sends him to the place he actually wants to go. The fact that it’s July 12 and the Wild still don’t have a deal done for Quinn tells you there’s already a snag somewhere.
You can understand why Bill Guerin is pushing. He just might be pushing too hard for everyone to ignore it.
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For the Devils, that means staying patient but ready. New Jersey has the cap space and the kind of trade assets that can matter in a deal of this size, and it is among the clubs that have shown serious interest as the market develops. The question now is whether the path ever opens wide enough for the Devils to turn that interest into something real. [Read more 🡒]
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The bigger question is how that confidence translates into the crease mix going forward. The Devils appear to be lining up Daws with Jake Allen and David Rittich for the 2026-27 season, which gives the club options but also leaves plenty to be decided about who will handle the heaviest load. Daws has shown he can step in when needed, and now the next stretch is about whether New Jersey is ready to give him a much larger role. [Read more 🡒]