After an NHL season that ends short of a Stanley Cup — and especially one that finished short of the postseason — a coaching staff has to take a hard, cold look at what went wrong.

Certainly that applies to the Minnesota Wild, and it wasn’t hard to find defects, after the team missed the postseason for just the second time in 12 seasons. And while a series of injuries to key players that almost became farce might have defined the team’s 2023-24 season, it wasn’t all about bad luck.

“You’re looking for different ways to make your team better,” head coach John Hynes said this week, “and one of those ways that we felt, obviously, was penalty killing.”

Eight of the 10 teams with the worst penalty kills last season missed the playoffs, and the two that made it to the postseason — Toronto and the New York Islanders — were bounced in the first round. The Wild had one of the NHL’s worst, their 74.5 percent success rate worse than everyone except the Islanders (71.5) and Anaheim (72.4).

To that end, the Wild announced two offseason moves this week, signing winger Yakov Trenin to a four-year, $14 million free-agent deal, and adding former Islanders head coach Jack Capuano to the coaching staff.

“Jack is very, very passionate about the PK,” Wild general manager Bill Guerin said. “He’s always had a good track record with it. So, we’re looking to definitely improve in that aspect.”

You can add Jake Middleton’s four-year, $17.4 million contract extension to that plan. He was already under contract for next season, but will be part of the team that Guerin hopes will enter its prime over the next several seasons.

On a team that lost Jared Spurgeon, Jonas Brodin and Marcus Foligno for long stretches — then traded away Connor Dewar and Brandon Duhaime — Middleton was the most consistent penalty killer last season, leading the team in blocks (161), and was third in hits (148 hits).

Hynes said Monday that Capuano, a colleague on international coaching staffs, will run the defense and work with Patrick Dwyer on reconstructing a penalty kill that gave up 67 power-play goals last season, second only to Anaheim’s 91. Trenin, another big body at 6-foot-2, 200 pounds, averaged 150.5 shorthanded minutes the past two seasons.

“He’s definitely going to help in that department,” Guerin said of Trenin. “It’s something that he’s very good at. We did not have a good year last year on the PK.”

To get better next season, Guerin is, of course, relying on something out of anyone’s control. Injuries threw a wrench into everything last season, and there is no guarantee they won’t happen again. In fact, in the NHL, the season without major injury losses, for any amount of time, is rare.

And then there is the uncertainty surrounding players such as Marcus Johansson and Freddy Gaudreau, who plain underperformed in 2023-24, combining for 16 goals and 29 points in a combined 144 games. You can add mercurial forward Ryan Hartman to that wish list.

Hartman was pretty good last season — 21 goals, 45 points and a plus-4 in 74 games. But when he signed Hartman to a three-year, $12 million extension last fall, Guerin was hoping for more from a skilled player who had career highs of 34 goals and 65 points in 2021-22.

The Wild believe improving the penalty kill is something mostly in their control. They want the Wild to regain the identity of being a heavy team that is hard to play against in all situations. Regardless of the composition of a PK unit, Hynes said, “There’s got to be a mindset on the penalty kill.”

Guerin and Hynes are even thinking of moving talented forward Matt Boldy into the mix. He played some PK for Team USA in international play this spring under head coach Hynes.

“With how dynamic the power plays are, nothing’s ever static. So, you’ve gotta have guys that can make reads and have experience doing it,” Hynes said. “Trenin’s certainly a guy that is a very good penalty killer. So, I think when you have guys that can do it, and then you coach it the right way, it should be a significant improvement for us.”

After playing against Trenin in the Central Division the past few seasons, Middleton is sold on Trenin.

“I think it’s a great signing,” he said. “He is hard to play against. He forechecks like an animal. He finishes every check. Great penalty kill. … I’ve never been on the power play, but I’ve watched him kill penalties. Good at that. I think it’s a good pickup.”

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Taylor Sisk | KFF Health News (TNS)

JELLICO, Tenn. — In March 2021, this town of about 2,000 residents in the hills of east Tennessee lost its hospital, a 54-bed acute care facility. Campbell County, where Jellico is located, ranks 90th of Tennessee’s 95 counties in health outcomes and has a poverty rate almost double the national average, so losing its health care cornerstone sent ripple effects through the region.

“Oh, my word,” said Tawnya Brock, a health care quality manager and a Jellico resident. “That hospital was not only the health care lifeline to this community. Economically and socially, it was the center of the community.”

Since 2010, 149 rural hospitals in the United States have either closed or stopped providing in-patient care, according to the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina. Tennessee has recorded the second-most closures of any state, with 15, and the most closures per capita. Texas has the highest number of rural hospital closures, with 25.

Each time a hospital closes there are health care and economic ripples across a community. When Jellico Medical Center closed, some 300 jobs went with it. Restaurants and other small businesses in Jellico also have gone under, said Brock, who is a member of the Rural Health Association of Tennessee’s legislative committee. And the town must contend with the empty husk of a hospital.

Dozens of small communities are grappling with what to do with hospitals that have closed. Sheps Center researchers have found that while a closure negatively affects the local economy, those effects can be softened if the building is converted to another type of health care facility.

In Jellico, the town owns the building that housed the medical center, and Mayor Sandy Terry said it is in decent condition. But the last operator, Indiana-based Boa Vida Healthcare, holds the license to operate a medical facility there and has yet to announce its plans for the building, leaving Jellico in limbo. Terry said local officials are talking with health care providers that have expressed interest in reopening the hospital. That’s their preferred option. Jellico does not have a Plan B.

“We’re just in hopes that maybe someone will take it over,” Terry said. Meanwhile, the nearest emergency rooms are a half-hour drive away in LaFollette, Tennessee, and across the state line in Corbin, Kentucky.

An hour and a half away in Fentress County, the building that once housed Jamestown Regional Medical Center has been empty since June 2019, when Florida-based Rennova Health — which also previously operated Jellico Medical Center — locked it up.

County Executive Jimmy Johnson said Rennova’s exit from Jamestown was so abrupt that “the beds were all made up perfectly” and IV stands and wheelchairs sat in the halls. About 150 jobs evaporated when the center closed.

Rennova still owed Fentress County $207,000 in taxes, Johnson said, and in April the property was put up for auction. A local business owner purchased it for $220,000. But Rennova was granted a year to reacquire the building for what it owed in back taxes, plus interest, and did so within a few days.

Abandoned hospital buildings dot the map in central and east Tennessee. But in the western part of the state, two communities found uses for their empty buildings, albeit not in reopening hospitals.

Somerville, about an hour east of Memphis, lost its hospital, Methodist Fayette, in 2015. Its parent company, Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, donated the building to the town and threw in $250,000. The building is now a satellite campus for the University of Tennessee-Martin.

The conversion was pushed along by the town leveraging other funding. Bob Turner, Somerville’s city administrator, said both the town and the county matched Methodist’s quarter-million dollars toward the renovation. In its first year in Somerville, the university raised another $125,000. Tennessee’s governor then matched that $875,000 in his state budget.

Somerville is now in the seventh year of a 10-year agreement with the university, which rents the building from the town.

“We have a building, an asset, that’s probably worth $15 million,” Turner said. “It’s a four-year university right here in the heart of Fayette County.”

Mendi Donnelly, Somerville’s community development director, said the county is still in desperate need of a hospital, but “we’re thrilled that we were able to make lemonade out of our lemons.”

Ninety miles to the northeast, in rural Carroll County, Tennessee, another shuttered hospital found new life.

The closing of McKenzie Regional Hospital in 2018 was a blow to the local economy. But Baptist Memorial Health Care, which operates a hospital in nearby Huntingdon, bought the assets — including the building, land, equipment, and ambulance service — and subsequently donated the building to the town of McKenzie.

Cachengo, a technology company, ultimately took over the space. Because of hospitals’ electrical infrastructure, the site was a perfect fit for a business like his, said Ash Young, Cachengo’s chief executive. Young said Cachengo is now looking into repurposing abandoned hospitals across the country.

Jill Holland, McKenzie’s former mayor and a local-government and special-projects coordinator for the Southwest Tennessee Development District, believes the town can become a technology hub.

“It’s opening a lot of doors of opportunity for the youth in the community,” Holland said.

Back in Jamestown, the vacant hospital is “deteriorating,” said Johnson, the county executive. “It could have been used to save lives.” Rennova did not respond to a request for comment.

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The University of Tennessee Medical Center opened a freestanding emergency room elsewhere in Jamestown, sparing residents a half-hour drive to the closest ER. Johnson believes the old hospital building could serve the community as housing for those who are homeless or as a facility to treat substance use disorder.

Brock, the health care quality manager, thinks things will get better in Jellico, but the community has had its hopes dashed more than once.

Brock believes a freestanding emergency room could be a viable solution. She urges her community to be responsive to “a new day” in rural health in America, one in which a hospital must focus on its community’s most urgent needs and be realistic about what that hospital can provide.

“Maybe it is just the emergency room, a sustainable emergency room, where you could hold patients for a period of time and then transfer them,” Brock said. “And then you build upon that.”

She added, “There are options out there.”

(KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs of KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.)

©2024 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

A 34-year-old man pleaded guilty Wednesday to breaking into a woman’s home in St. Paul’s Macalester-Groveland and sexually assaulting her at gunpoint in April.

Deonte Marquon Thomas, of Maplewood, will face a 20-year sentence, which was agreed upon by prosecutors and Thomas’ attorney, according to the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office.

Deonte Marquon Thomas (Courtesy of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office)

After his arrest on April 25, Thomas told police he’d been driving around and “randomly selected a house to break into,” according to a criminal complaint.

The woman had called 911 on April 15 and officers were dispatched to the 300 block of South Snelling Avenue about 4:20 a.m. She said she was sleeping when she heard pounding on the side door of her home, and then saw a man break the door’s glass, reach inside and unlock the door.

The man choked her, causing her to pass out. He pointed a gun at her and she feared she would die, the complaint said. The man sexually assaulted her and, at one point, she bit his arm as hard as she could.

After he left, police searched for the assailant, including using a canine and drones, but didn’t find him in the area.

Police reviewed residential security videos and one showed a pickup in the alley near the victim’s residence at the time of the attack, and five of six license plate characters were visible. Police traced the license plate to a pickup registered to Thomas, the complaint said.

Thomas pleaded guilty Wednesday to first-degree criminal sexual conduct while armed with a dangerous weapon and first-degree burglary. A charge of possession of a firearm by a person prohibited due to a felony conviction will be dismissed, according to the county attorney’s office.

Thomas, who remains in custody, is scheduled to be sentenced in September. His attorney couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

Sexual assaults by strangers are rare; eight out of 10 rapes are committed by someone known to the victim, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network.

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