The days leading up to today’s March 21^st NHL trade deadline have been busy for the Minnesota Wild, acquiring Tyson Jost from the Colorado Avalanche for Nico Sturm, as well as Nicolas Deslauriers from the Anaheim Ducks in exchange for a 2023 3^rd round pick.

Tyson Jost is one of the more interesting gets this trade deadline season in our opinion, as the former 10^th overall pick has always been an extremely positive AB player. He is coming off back-to-back +7.6 individual AB seasons with the Avalanche and is a +3.5 career AB player overall during the course of his four-year NHL career thus far. Tyson Jost actually registered a +3.5 individual score at the midseason point, positively contributing to the Avalanche’s +99.02 overall team AB forty-one games in. Despite being a valuable AB asset, Jost has struggled to offensively produce during his career, as he has never registered above thirty points in a season before. In fact, his career-high point total in a season is twenty-six (eleven goals plus fifteen assists) in seventy games with the Avalanche in 2018-19. It’s going to be an interesting dynamic on the Wild fourth line centered by the twenty-four-year-old Jost, as Dailyfaceoff.com projects his two wingers will be rookie Brandon Duhaime (-5.14 Midseason AB), and newly acquired Nicolas Deslauriers (-4.39 Midseason AB, -5.59 Career AB). Perhaps we see the positive Jost boost these scores over the remainder of the season to help the Wild make a playoff push.

Nicolas Deslauriers is a tough, gritty bottom-six forward who is expected to be an everyday player for the Wild down the stretch. Deslauriers has scored five goals with five assists for ten points in sixty-one games played. In addition to those ten points, he also has 210 hits, fifth in the league behind only Florida’s Radko Gudas, NYR’s Ryan Reaves, NYI’s Cal Clutterbuck, and Nashville’s Tanner Jeannot. AB wise, Deslauriers has only registered one individually positive season in 2017-18 with the Montreal Canadiens and is coming off three consecutive negative scores recorded. He is a -5.59 career-AB player in his eight-year career.

The Minnesota Wild are 5-4-1 in their last ten games, and currently have a 36-20-4 record overall in sixty games played. The Wild currently sit in third-place in the Central Division and have two games-in-hand on the fourth-place Nashville Predators. We’ll see what else the Wild and GM Bill Guerin have in store during today’s trade deadline day, as they were rumored over the weekend to have shown interest in Marc-Andre Fleury. Much more to come.