With the draft starting Friday and free agency opening on Monday, Bill Guerin enters the biggest week of the NHL offseason aiming to make his team better, next season and beyond. But don’t mistake the Wild general manager for a desperate man.

Minnesota has a nearly full roster of players on one-way deals for the 2024-25 season, prospects the brass believes are ready for the next step and, despite facing one last season with $14.7 million in dead cap space, even a little money to acquire a free agent or two.

Guerin has options this week, he said Monday, and that includes remaining at No. 13 in the first round of the draft Friday in Las Vegas, trading that pick up or down, and pulling Filip Gustavsson off the trading block and sending Jesper Wallstedt back to Iowa this fall.

“To give something, we need to get something we really like,” Guerin said Monday. “We could do it, but we don’t have to do anything. Some teams are in a spot where they need to do something. We don’t feel that way. We have a lot to offer. There’s no rush to do it.”

That might not excite fans disappointed — or worse — by Minnesota’s failure to make the playoffs last season, but the GM promises he won’t do anything rash.

“All the rumors that go round and round and round, that means nothing,” Guerin said. “The ability to not have to do anything is a good position, too. If we were in position to have to do something, it would be a lot tougher.”

The Wild missed the playoffs for just the second time in 12 years last season, and the reasons were obvious, from injuries to underperformance and smaller things in between.

A 5-10-2 start cost coach Dean Evason his job, and after the team found its footing under John Hynes, injuries to key skaters such as Jared Spurgeon, Jonas Brodin, Marcus Foligno and Kirill Kaprizov squelched, fatally, the momentum until Guerin decided to sell at the trade deadline.

Forwards Marcus Johansson and, especially, Freddy Gaudreau sputtered, adding 16 goals and 45 points in 145 combined games. Gustavsson followed a brilliant first full NHL season in goal (23-9-7, 2.10 goals-against average, .931 save percentage) with a below-average one (3.06 GAA, .899 save percentage).

Johansson is owed $2 million for one more season, Gaudreau four more at $2.1 million a pop. Gustavsson has two more years on a three-year, $11.25 million contract.

They’re all coming back, unless the Wild can find the right trade destination for Gustavsson, who otherwise will form a tandem with veteran Marc-Andre Fleury. The better of the two last season, Fleury will turn 40 in November and retire at season’s end. The Wild like his ability to mentor top goalie prospect Jesper Wallstedt, 20, next season, but they’re also not afraid to send Wallstedt back to Iowa.

“One thing I’ve always tried not to do is panic,” Guerin said. “We had a lot of injuries and subpar years, and that happens. People have off years, and people get injuries, that’s the way it went. It doesn’t change my feeling on some of the players and what they’re capable of. We need to have a bounce back.”

The Wild also need a few rookies to step up the way defenseman Brock Faber did last season. The former Big Ten defenseman of the year from Maple Grove is one of two finalists for the Calder Trophy that goes to the NHL’s top rookie along with Chicago center Connor Bedard.

With Spurgeon, and later Brodin, out, Faber became the team’s minutes leader (24:58 a game), a first-unit special-teams regular and fifth-best scorer (eight goals and 47 points).

“We knew he was a really experienced player coming in, but (he) took on roles we probably didn’t envision with success,” Wild director of amateur scouting Judd Brackett said. “You can’t take away the minutes he played against the players he did; it was incredible. We’re very fortunate. And obviously, he’ll continue to grow. It’s incredible.”

So, who’s next? Even with all hands healthy and on deck, to be better next season, the Wild need another prospect or two to step up in a similar way. Even before the injuries, they were down a reliable scoring forward. Guerin will try to pick one up as a free agent — there are some available — but to meet the team’s goal of a real playoff run, another rookie will need to surprise them.

Left wing Liam Ohgren seems to be the likeliest candidate after playing four solid games last spring. But Guerin said assuming the 19th overall pick in the 2022 draft will make the team would be a mistake.

“Don’t assume anything for anyone making the team,” he said.

The Wild swapped restricted free-agent forward Adam Beckman for another, New Jersey’s Graeme Clarke. last week, and plan to give Sammy Walker a qualifying offer. They’ll part ways with veteran Jacob Lucchini and are undecided on Mason Shaw, a pending UFA who has been through a lot and is well liked in the organization.

That said, Guerin believes prospects Ohgren, 20, and fellow forwards Riley Heidt, 19, and Hunter Haight — who turned 20 in April and just won a Memorial Cup with OHL Saginaw — have the ability to play in the NHL right now. Ohgren played four solid games for the Wild last spring, and Heidt and Haight had outstanding seasons in the CHL.

“Yeah, it’s hard. They are 19, 20, and it’s an unforgiving league and tough to make it, sure,” Guerin said. “They’ll make it at the right time. If one guy makes it, great. But we’re not going to force a square peg into a round hole.”

They’re baaaack

Wild players under contract for next season as of Jun 25, 2024:

Forwards: Kirill Kaprizov, Joel Eriksson Ek, Matt Boldy, Mats Zuccarello, Marco Rossi, Ryan Hartman, Marcus Foligno, Marcus Johansson, Frederick Gaudreau, Vinni Lettieri

Defense: Jared Spurgeon, Brock Faber, Jonas Brodin, Jake Middleton, Zach Bogosian, Jon Merrill, Declan Chisholm

Goaltenders: Filip Gustavsson, Marc-Andre Fleury

Contenders: F Liam Ohgren, C Marat Khusnutdinov, C Hunter Haight, C Riley Heidt, F Sammy Walker, D Ryan O’Rourke, D David Spacek, D Carson Lambos, D Daemon Hunt, G Jesper Wallstedt

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Port Canaveral will get to keep three Disney Cruise Line ships in late 2025 as the sailing plans for six of what will be eight ships in the fleet were revealed.

That includes Disney Treasure, set to debut this winter, and 2022’s Disney Wishas well as older ships Disney Magic and Disney Fantasy trading off sailing duties.

The new homeport and sailing plans for Disney Destiny, a sister ship to Wish and Treasure, was not announced, but it’s slated to be delivered to the line at a yet-to-be-revealed date in 2025 and could end up DCL’s new second Florida home in Port Everglades.

Also debuting in 2025 will be the Asia-bound Disney Adventure, but for now, DCL only revealed sailing plans for its two original ships, Magic and Wonder, its two decade-plus-old ships Dream and Fantasy and its two most recent ships Wish and Treasure.

Port Canaveral will continue to host Wish sailing short three- and four-night Bahamas trips while Treasure will continue with seven-night Caribbean sailings.

Disney Magic, which arrives to the port in summer 2025, will remain through October and then be replaced with Disney Fantasy in November doing a four- and five-night set of itineraries through May 2026.

Wish, Magic and Fantasy all have some trips that visit Disney’s newest private Bahamas destination Lookout Cay at Lighthouse Point that welcomed first guests this month. Some sailings visit both Lookout Cay and the line’s original Bahamas private island Castaway Cay.

Disney Cruise Line’s new ship Disney Wish travels on the Ems River from the Meyer Werft shipyard on its way to sea trials in the North Sea on March 30, 2022. (Robert Fiebak/Disney Cruise Line/TNS)

Many of the September and October sailings will take on the popular Halloween on the High Seas theming while November and December sailings will have the Very Merrytime holiday theme.

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Disney Magic has not sailed from Port Canaveral since 2016, and as the line’s oldest ship has been tasked with bouncing around the world for short-term stays at various markets. It will do so again after October, first heading to Puerto Rico for a series of seven-night Caribbean sailings, and then making its way to Galveston, Texas, for four- to seven-night western Caribbean trips through May 2026.

Disney Dream will keep sailing from its new year-round home in Port Everglades, which opened for business last fall. It will tackle three- to five-night Bahamas trips visiting either Lookout Cay, Castaway Cay or both, as well as some stops in Nassau through May 2026.

After a summer of Alaska sailings, Disney Wonder will continue its late 2025 duties in Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific, not returning to the West Coast homeporting in San Diego beginning in March 2026 for three- and four-night Mexican Riviera sailings. This will be the third season Disney Wonder has sailed from Australia.

Bookings for the new itineraries open to the public June 28, with earlier dates available for the line’s variety of club-level members, but details can already be found on disneycruise.com.

James Tarmy | (TNS) Bloomberg News

Given how rare it is that anyone has time to read for pleasure—especially when there are blockbusters to watch, jewels to buy, trips to take, music to listen to and ice cream to eat—the book had better be worth it. That’s why the stakes are so high in compiling a summer reading list: Choose the wrong text and you’ve squandered your moment in the sun.

Luckily for you, we’ve done the work. See below for nine titles we’ve personally read that won’t disappoint.

Nonfiction

When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Glamour and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion. By Julie Satow (Doubleday)

If anything, the title undersells the full scope of women’s influence on American fashion. Satow shows how females occupied every strata of the U.S. sartorial landscape, particularly in the half-century from the 1930s to the ‘80s, when homegrown apparel makers emerged from the shadow of Paris and came into their own. Leading the charge—often from perches at such department stores as Bonwit Teller, Henri Bendel and Lord & Taylor—women helped dictate sales, merchandising, advertising and strategies for what was, even then, a colossal industry.

The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir. By Griffin Dunne (Penguin Press)

Perhaps you’ve heard of Griffin Dunne’s father, the novelist and longtime Vanity Fair columnist Dominick Dunne? Or maybe you’ve read a book by Dominick’s brother, the famed journalist and author John Gregory Dunne? Certainly, you’re aware of John’s wife (and therefore, Griffin Dunne’s aunt), the writer Joan Didion? Even if you’ve managed to remain ignorant of all three, that’s fine. This memoir will still be a gripping read.

Griffin Dunne grew up surrounded by an almost incomprehensible amount of megawatt celebrities that ran the spectrum from Sean Connery to Carrie Fisher, and he has excellent anecdotes about all of them. (Connery saved Dunne from drowning in a swimming pool; Fisher was Dunne’s confidante.) But this is not a series of gauzy recollections of the good old days. First, Dunne is clearly not the nostalgic type. Second, his life included enough tragedy that it would be nearly impossible to spin it into a glossy Hollywood ending.

Do Something: Coming of Age Amid the Glitter and Doom of ’70s New York. By Guy Trebay (Knopf)

It’s always a little nerve-wracking when a beloved journalist writes a book outside their beat: Will they find their footing? Trebay, who’s been a style reporter and critic at the New York Times for decades, quickly puts those fears to rest. He’s a lovely writer whose recollections, which begin with a not altogether happy childhood and move quickly to a bohemian life in New York, are riveting. It’s not just sex, drugs and rock and roll: He manages to parlay fan letters into friendships with the photographer Horst P. Horst and the screenwriter and novelist Anita Loos and also befriends the aging American couturier Charles James. Trebay isn’t a sensationalist. He knew the toast of downtown at its arguable cultural peak, but he doesn’t bend over backwards to place himself at its center.

The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss. By Margalit Fox (Random House)

Organized crime in the U.S. tends to be synonymous with the Mafia, a chauvinist group of good old boys running protection rackets and ordering hits. But in the mid-19th century there was an equally formidable game in town, run by a Jewish immigrant named Fredericka (“Marm”) Mandelbaum, who had clawed her way from steerage class to become one of the country’s wealthiest women. One newspaper reported that she would often wear as much as $40,000 worth of jewelry worth about $1.2 million today, according to the book. Estimates put the total of stolen goods that passed through her Lower East Side shop at about $10 million (roughly $300 million today). Her literal rags-to-riches story is presented with depth in this spectacular and true story of ingenuity, business acumen and brazen criminality.

Fiction

Gretel and the Great War. By Adam Ehrlich Sachs (FSG Originals)

Sachs has created a sort of fairy tale in an extremely clever novelistic construction: In 1919 a young woman named Gretel is found abandoned and unable to speak. Following entreaties to the public, she receives a string of bedtime stories in the mail (one for every letter of the alphabet) from a man who claims to be her father. They’re often structured as children’s stories with adult themes (a modernist architect, forced to cover his building with flowers so as not to offend the sensibilities of a young girl, falls paternalistically in love with her and tragedy ensues). Gradually, it becomes clear that each story is intertwined with others in a mosaic of anecdotes that, taken together, creates a picture of a belle epoque Vienna teetering on the edge of obliteration.

Caledonian Road. By Andrew O’Hagan (W. W. Norton & Company)

A pitch-perfect send-up of London’s dirty rich and their many hangers-on, O’Hagan’s latest is an absolute joy to read. Even if you don’t care about the novel’s many insider winks—this is surely the first time in years that the briefly famous artist Dash Snow has been name-checked—the story is impossible to put down. Campbell Flynn, the book’s protagonist, is a celebrity intellectual whose success has propelled him into the echelons of the very wealthy. This is in theory a good thing, but Campbell, who was born middle class, is perennially insecure about money, status and fame. When his world falls apart, those preoccupations aren’t revealed to be bad, exactly. But they are, with the benefit of hindsight, the precise ingredients of his undoing.

The Heart in Winter. By Kevin Barry (Doubleday)

It takes a second to get into the heavily stylized rhythm of Barry’s period-patois prose, but once you do, the payoff is worth it. Occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, the novel, which could plausibly be called a Western, follows two sort-of-outlaw lovers as they leave the relative comfort of Butte, Montana, and head into the wilderness. Tom, a triple threat (drug addict, alcoholic, poet), and his paramour Polly (recently married … to someone else) are headed to the supposed freedom of San Francisco. Before they get there, they have to reckon with, among other trials, a posse of Cornish gunmen.

The Son of Man. By Jean-Baptiste Del Amo (Grove)

Even the most faithfully translated books can lack a vital spark of the original. But in Frank Wynne’s translation of an exquisite 2021 novel by French wunderkind Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, the story—an atmospheric exploration of filial relationships—loses none of its taut beauty. A boy and his mother leave their modest suburban house and follow the boy’s father, who has returned unexpectedly to his family cabin in the middle of the wilderness after disappearing years earlier. As the boy and his mother acclimate themselves to a new existence in an almost primeval forest, tensions among the three become almost too much to bear.

Things Don’t Break on Their Own. By Sarah Easter Collins (Crown)

The setup, a combination of old friends and new acquaintances who gather for a dinner party, is straight out of Clue. But the underlying tension—a woman still searching for her sister years after she disappeared—is something else. Using a series of prolonged flashbacks told through various attendees, the mystery of the disappearance is told from multiple angles; the fact that its resolution is a little too neat does nothing to blunt the force of the narrative.

___

©2024 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Country star Jon Pardi will headline the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand on Aug. 28.

Tickets are priced from $88 to $44 and go on sale at 10 a.m. Friday through Etix or by calling 800-514-3849. Canadian country singer MacKenzie Porter (“These Days,” “Thinking ‘Bout You”) will open.

A California native, Pardi began writing music as a teenager and, after graduating from high school, he moved to Nashville to pursue a career in music. He landed a contract with Capitol and hit the road in 2010 opening for his labelmate Dierks Bentley. Three years later, his second single “Up All Night” went platinum and hit No. 10.

In the time since, Pardi has not been the most prolific artist in the genre and has released just a single or two each year for the past decade. But he chose wisely, as nearly all of them went platinum or better, including “Head Over Boots,” “Dirt on My Boots,” “Heartache on the Dance Floor,” “Night Shift,” “Heartache Medication” and “Ain’t Always the Cowboy.”

Pardi has also collaborated with fellow artists including Luke Bryan (“Cowboys and Plowboys”), Thomas Rhett (“Beer Can’t Fix”), Lauren Alaina (“Getting Over Him”) and Midland (“Longneck Way to Go”).

The 2024 Grandstand schedule is now complete. Here’s the lineup:

Thursday, Aug. 22: Becky G
Friday, Aug. 23: Chance the Rapper
Saturday, Aug. 24: Nate Bargatze
Sunday, Aug. 25: Blake Shelton
Monday, Aug. 26: The Happy Together Tour
Tuesday, Aug. 27: Ludacris and T-Pain
Wednesday, Aug. 28: Jon Pardi
Thursday, Aug. 29: Motley Crue
Friday, Aug. 30: Matchbox Twenty
Saturday, Aug. 31: Stephen Sanchez
Sunday, Sept. 1: Amateur Talent Contest finals
Monday, Sept. 2: Kidz Bop Live

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