ST. LOUIS — On Monday, Minnesota Wild coach John Hynes smiled as he talked about his team’s centers and the veteran experience he expected to have down the middle, with Marco Rossi, Joel Eriksson Ek, Ryan Hartman and newly-acquired Marco Sturm ready to go for the season-opening visit to the Blues.
By Wednesday, everything had changed.
Before his team boarded their Missouri-bound charter, Hynes revealed that an upper body injury that has limited Sturm’s availability for all of training camp has caused a setback, and the Wild will not have the faceoff specialist for the foreseeable future.
“I know he’s going to be out for a while. I believe that he’s getting ready to see doctors. I think it’s later today or tomorrow,” Hynes said on Wednesday afternoon. “So, I’ll probably have more information for you then. But I would anticipate him being out for a significant amount of time.”
The Wild are already without veteran winger Mats Zuccarello, expected to miss 7-8 weeks because of a lower body injury.
In the near term, Sturm’s absence means a more youthful look on the fourth line, with veteran Vinnie Hinostroza on one wing, relatively untested Liam Ohgren — who has 28 NHL games on his resume — on the other, and likely Hunter Haight, 21, or possibly Danila Yurov, 21, making his NHL debut at center.
“There’s lots of games coming, so we’ll just get to the lineup that we feel most comfortable with and gives us the best chance to win against St. Louis,” Hynes said, noting the Wild will look to experienced centers such as Hartman to pick up some of Sturm’s faceoff and penalty-killing roles.
“As long as he’s out, I’ve got to be good in the faceoff dot and be reliable,” said Hartman. “I’m excited to get going.”
Sturm, 30, signed a two-year, $4 million contract with Minnesota for his second stint in a Wild uniform over the summer after winning the Stanley Cup with the Florida Panthers last season. After playing college hockey at Clarkson, the German made his NHL debut with Minnesota in 2019 and played more than 100 games in a Wild uniform before a March 2022 trade to Colorado, where he won his first Stanley Cup.
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