After recovering from a serious injury to his chest and shoulder, Travis Boyd was a free agent looking for an NHL team that would look at his long resume and say, “This is just the kind of guy we need.”
That team just happened to be the one Boyd grew up watching.
“If I’m fortunate enough to make the team, running onto the ice that first game and to hear the announcer say, ‘Here come your Minnesota Wild,’ I mean, I got the chills going down the back of my neck just saying that out loud,” he said.
Boyd, 31, is one of a handful of NHL veterans the Wild brought in this summer, mostly as free agents, to help shore up its depth after missing the postseason for just the second time in 12 seasons last year.
The four-year Gophers player from Hopkins, a sixth-round entry draft pick by Washington in 2011, has 47 goals and 118 points in 296 NHL games and a Stanley Cup ring from his rookie season in Washington, where he played in eight games, including a big postseason win at Pittsburgh, as a rookie in 2017-18.
Boyd was scheduled to play in his second preseason game Wednesday night in Dallas. He earned an assist in the Wild’s first exhibition, a 5-2 victory at Winnipeg last weekend. He signed a one-year, two-way contract on July 1 after missing most of 2023-24 with a serious pectoral injury, “torn off,” in his words, on a check into the boards by Colorado’s Josh Manson.
The two-way deal is Boyd’s first in seven years.
“This is my 10th training camp, so I’ve been doing it for a while,” he said after a morning practice at TRIA Rink on Wednesday. “Knowing going into this season that this could easily be my last chance to stay around in this league, with how many good players there are and how many young kids come in every year, my goal was to be ready (on) Day 1 of camp, and I really feel like I’ve put a good foot forward.”
He certainly has made the right impression on a coaching staff eager to add veteran depth. Whether those players start the season in St. Paul or Iowa, there will be opportunities to play NHL minutes at some point. Because of injuries, the Wild used seven forwards who started the season at Iowa last year, and nine of them made much of an impact, finishing with a combined eight goals and 21 in 132 games.
Shoring up the minor league depth — and the production from the bottom six in general — was a big part of the team’s offseason agenda. They signed Boyd, Brendan Gaunce and Reese Johnson, and traded Vinnie Lettieri (5-4–9 in 46 games last season) to Boston for Jakub Lauko.
“I think we’ve found the style of players, the roles they can play in, the experience that they have that we feel, if they’re in Iowa, they’re going to be really good players and good leaders,” head coach John Hynes said. “They play the game the right way, they’ve got some size, their competitiveness, their skill. And then I think when they come up — some of these guys have 300, 200 games in the NHL — and they know what their roles are. So, we feel really good about that.”
Johnson, who had two goals and five points in 42 games last season in Chicago, has been sidelined by an upper body injury, but Boyd, Lauko and Gaunce have been impressive early.
Boyd was settling into a good place with the Coyotes, playing his first 82-game season in 2022-23, and a strong 2-6–8 in 16 games last year before he was injured on Nov. 30. When he was hurt, coach Andre Tourigny was effusive in his praise for the veteran center.
“I have a lot of good things to say about him,” Tourigny told reporters on Dec. 2. “He changed his role from last year and over the last two years. … This year he had to play bottom six and be very responsible defensively and he was an example. We were joking a lot when talking about ‘Coach Boyd’ and he was so textbook on his positioning and on everything defensively.”
Boyd has been able to live at home with his family in Edina during camp, a rare luxury, and was feeling good about his camp so far ahead of Wednesday night’s game — his second game of any kind since completing a long, arduous rehabilitation process.
“It’s been challenging. It’s been tiring. I think it’s been a good set of days for everybody,” he said. “I think we’ve gotten a lot better, and we’ve put in a lot of good work.”
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