It’s finally official: In downtown St. Paul, the Xcel Energy Center is losing the name Xcel Energy as the utility’s $3 million-per-year naming rights agreement dries up this summer after a 25-year run.

The energy corporation announced Tuesday it will continue to be involved in the home of the Minnesota Wild through online and in-arena advertising, as well as grants to youth and high school hockey organizations, but the “X” will have to soldier on without Xcel in the title for the first time since its construction in 2000.

Other corporate sponsors

As Wild owner Craig Leipold and city officials continue to pitch what they hope will be a $769 million reinvention of the entire arena, concert and convention center facility, will a corporate sponsor step up to buy naming rights and help usher the multi-purpose arena into the future?

St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter answers questions about the Xcel Energy Center during a Minnesota Senate Capital Investment Committee hearing in the Senate Building in St. Paul on Tuesday, March. 25, 2025. Joining Mayor Carter is Minnesota Wild Owner Craig Leipold. The city of St. Paul and Minnesota Wild are funds to renovate the Xcel Energy Center. The request is for the state to pay for half of the projected $769 million cost. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

You betcha.

The Twin Cities is home to 17 Fortune 500 companies and others, like Securian, on the border of making the list, a relatively strong showing per capita for a Midwestern metro. That leaves the door open to a number of potential corporate partners interested in making their name synonymous with “The State of Hockey.”

Pioneer Press sports columnist Charley Walters reported last year that Securian and Royal Bank of Canada had done more than just kick the tires on a potential naming rights agreement, “and a handful of other firms are seriously interested.”

Xcel Energy has been the title sponsor for the X under an $80 million agreement, worth about $3 million per year for the past 25 years. The next agreement could, according to Walters, total as much as $10 million per year for the next 25 years.

If the Wild have a corporate ally in mind, they were playing coy on Tuesday, refusing to divulge specifics beyond a written announcement that the team “expects to announce a new arena naming rights partner before the start of the 2025-26 NHL season.”

A spokesman for the Wild, which manages the arena and convention center on behalf of the city, said they would have no further comment.

Xcel to remain long-term partner

While dropping out of the arena title, Xcel Energy will remain involved as a long-term partner, according to a joint announcement from the team and the energy company, which plans to launch an initiative dubbed “Community Power Play” to expand access to the sport for children and families throughout the state.

The program will provide grants to youth and high school hockey organizations, with a focus on financial assistance for young athletes, the purchase of equipment and ice time, and investments in and improvement of community-based rinks and facilities open to all residents.

Bob Frenzel, Xcel Energy chairman, president and chief executive officer, released a written statement on Tuesday noting that “25 years ago, the Minnesota Wild and Xcel Energy were new brands in the region. Today, these two brands have become embedded in our community and our culture.”

“This new chapter with the Wild extends our commitment to the region and will serve to expand access to the sport of hockey so that more young girls and boys across the state can access and more fully engage in this wonderful sport,” he said.

Plans for $769M in improvements

Alongside a new name, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter and Leipold, the team owner, hope to reinvent the arena itself, as well as the adjoining RiverCentre Convention Center and Roy Wilkins Auditorium.

A proposed renovation of St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center. The city of St. Paul and the Minnesota Wild are seeking funds to renovate the Xcel Energy Center, asking the state of Minnesota to pay for half of the projected $769 million cost. (Courtesy of the City of St. Paul)

The two appeared shoulder to shoulder in committee hearings before House and Senate lawmakers last month, pitching plans for $769 million in improvements.

Those improvements will rely on nearly $400 million in state appropriations bonds, as well as funding from the team, the city, Ramsey County and corporate sponsors.

Among the improvements, Leipold told lawmakers the Xcel renovation will create new types of seating areas more in line with modern demand, including low-cost, lounge-style community viewing rooms.

The mayor has released conceptual renderings and talked up plans of better connecting the arena to Rice Park and the Landmark Center with more public-facing amenities, such as exterior coffee shops. Under the title “Project Wow,” the Wild have attempted to lure the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame from Eveleth, Minn. to downtown St. Paul.

The arena and overall convention center campus, according to the St. Paul Area Chamber of Commerce, together draw nearly 2 million visitors to some 400 annual events. Those visits generate nearly $500 million in economic impact between spending, state and local sales tax, hotel stays and more.

The renovations could boost that spending by another $110 million, according to the chamber.

Undated courtesy rendering, circa March 2025, of a proposed renovation of St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center. The city of St. Paul and the Minnesota Wild are seeking funds to renovate the Xcel Energy Center, asking the state of Minnesota to pay for half of the projected $769 million cost. (Courtesy of the City of St. Paul)

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A year ago, the Timberwolves had a week off ahead of each of their first two playoff series — in the first round against Phoenix and the conference semifinals against Denver — and clearly used it to perfection.

Minnesota blitzed the Suns and Nuggets in each of the first two games of the series en route to reaching the Western Conference Finals.

But to assume the same thing could occur in Minnesota’s Round 1 bout with the Lakers. which starts Saturday in Los Angeles, is dangerous, largely because of one key difference: A year ago, Minnesota had just played Denver and Phoenix in the final week of the regular season, dropping both contests.

In fact, Minnesota played Denver thrice over its final 14 games, and Phoenix twice in its last six. So, all the data of what worked, what didn’t and what needed to change was abundant. Key points to drill into were obvious and practice plans were easy to dial up.

That’s not the case this time around.

Minnesota split four games with the Lakers during the regular season, but only one of those came after Los Angeles acquired superstar wing Luka Doncic. That game in LA, a nine-point Lakers victory, was Doncic’s sixth in a Lakers jersey, and Minnesota was without Rudy Gobert and Julius Randle.

You can largely throw it out.

“Obviously, an extremely good team, very different than the team that we faced most of the season, of course,” Wolves coach Chris Finch said Tuesday. “In that way, it’s reminiscent of the Dallas series last year, because we hadn’t really faced that iteration of Dallas. Of course, they’ve got different players, different personnel.”

And that Dallas series didn’t go well for the Wolves.

So, that’s the challenge this week for Minnesota, a team that has traditionally thrived off familiarity. Can the Wolves prep for the largely unknown, and adjust and react in real time as they gather more data about the matchup?

Because they do not have a cheat sheet for this exam.

“But we feel like we know who they are,” Finch said. “They’ve been trying to figure it out, and they look like a much better version of themselves. But we’ll have to be ready to make adjustments as we go.”

Wolves guard Mike Conley said the team is “excited” for the challenge, noting Minnesota has watched a lot of film and is “confident in what we can bring to the table.” Part of that confidence stems from the Wolves’ close to the season, in which they won 17 of their final 21 games. That stretch included a number of blowout victories.

They did a lot of things at a high level.

“I think momentum is huge for us coming into the playoffs,” Conley said. “We want to be able to be playing our best ball at the right time of the year, and we’ve accomplished that. … We came out and handled our business. Our team has been really business(-like in our) approach to all of our games, and has really locked into the defensive end and really locked in on being better offensively by moving and passing and making the right reads, and the early reads, and just trusting each other.”

But not only have the Wolves not played the Lakers in the past month and a half, they really haven’t played much of anyone. The combined records of the teams Minnesota played over its final 21 games is 718-1004. That’s the equivalent of playing a 34-win team — effectively, the Spurs — on most nights.

So, there were very few evenings in which Minnesota had its soft spots exposed. Does that mean those weaknesses no longer exist, or aren’t as problematic? Or will a team as good as the Lakers re-open scabs that might not actually have healed.

Minnesota’s soft schedule played a large role in helping the Wolves dodge the play-in tournament. Only time will tell if it properly prepared Minnesota for the playoffs.

“You can only play the schedule that’s in front of you, so to speak,” Finch said. “We’ve been pretty happy with the way that we played for large parts. We’ve done a lot of the controllables well. Those are things you absolutely must do in the playoffs — like take care of the ball and win the possession game and all that stuff. Measuring it by those accounts, we give ourselves a pretty decent grade, and feel confident where we are.”

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By NICHOLAS RICCARDI

A federal judge on Tuesday placed on hold much of Donald Trump’s order forbidding the federal government from doing business with anyone who hires the law firm Susman Godfrey, making it the fourth time a judge has found the president’s targeting of law firms is likely unconstitutional.

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“The framers of our constitution would see this as a shocking abuse of power,” District Court Judge Loren AliKhan said as she entered the temporary restraining order on behalf of Susman, which represented a voting machine firm that won a $787 billion settlement from Fox News over its airing of lies about Trump’s 2020 loss.

Trump’s executive order cited the firm’s election work as a reason it was targeted. Several other firms that have been targeted by Trump entered into settlements, promising to provide hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free legal work for the president’s favored causes. Susman and at least three others have chosen to fight, and all have so far won in court.

Don Verrilli, who represented Susman in court on Tuesday, urged the judge to continue that winning streak. “We’re sliding very fast into an abyss here,” he said. “There’s only one way to stop that slide, it’s for courts to act decisively, and to act decisively now.”

Though the restraining order technically is only good for 14 days, the judge left little doubt as to her views on the constitutionality of Trump’s order. She found it likely violates the first and fifth amendments of the U.S. Constitution, saying that “the government cannot hold lawyers hostage to force them to agree with it.”

Richard Lawson, who argued against the order for the Department of Justice, contended it fell squarely in the tradition of presidential decisions regarding contracting and federal facilities that date back to President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s requiring federal contractors to not discriminate. Lawson was unable to convince the judge to wait until federal agencies develop guidance about how to implement Trump’s order.

AliKhan put on hold provisions in the order that ban federal contractors to companies that hire Susman Godfrey and forbids its employees from entering federal buildings. Verrilli said Susman Godfrey received no warning or explanation of the federal order, but noted that Trump signed it a few weeks before the start of another libel trial over his 2020 election lies, this time targeting the conservative network Newsmax, owned by a prominent Trump ally.

Though other firms have also won rulings putting orders targeting them on hold, Attorney General Pam Bondi has sharply criticized at least one of them and told federal agencies they retain the authority to “decide with whom they will work.”

Some 10,000 federal health workers lost their jobs earlier this month — among them, a group of regulators who help new medicines get approved. If Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn’t reverse course, American patients will suffer and half a century of US leadership in pharmaceutical innovation could come to a precipitous end.

Three decades ago, the US lagged Europe in access to new medications. Respiratory drugs, on average, were available to Britons more than five years before Americans; cardiovascular drugs had a three-year lead. Pressured to narrow this disparity, Congress passed a law in 1992 to speed up drug approvals. The new framework allowed regulators to collect fees from drug companies, which vastly increased resources at the Food and Drug Administration for reviews.

The law — the Prescription Drug User Fee Act — has been a notable success. Median FDA review times fell from 26.6 months between 1980 and 1992 to 9.9 months in the decade through 2022. Today, Americans have access to three-quarters of new medicines, and the US has become a world leader in some of the most advanced treatments, including cell and gene therapies. The promise of such innovations — which can, among other medical miracles, target and destroy cancer cells, potentially reverse hearing loss, and enable sickle-cell patients to live without debilitating pain — can hardly be overstated.

Yet US dominance in such medicine shouldn’t be taken for granted. China’s drug industry is racing ahead, thanks to government investment and ambitious regulatory reform (that included aggressive hiring). Once known for supplying raw ingredients and manufacturing copycat drugs, China is now second only to the US in the development of new medicines. In the past three years, the number of drugs in China’s pipeline has doubled. Recent data show almost a third of clinical trials start in China, roughly on par with the US and up from 5% a decade ago.

Against this backdrop, these seemingly indiscriminate job cuts are worrisome. In addition to removing the head of the office that reviewed applications for new medicines, the FDA also has eliminated staff who negotiate user fees with drugmakers. Kennedy has long objected to user fees, arguing that the FDA’s reliance on industry funding — which constitutes almost half its budget — compromises its oversight. This is false: Cases of FDA-approved medications causing patients serious harm remain exceedingly rare. More to the point, the only serious alternative — raising taxes to pay for regulatory staff — is a political nonstarter.

Kennedy’s department said that neither drug reviewers nor inspectors would be cut in this reorganization, and that approvals wouldn’t slow down as a result. Recent reports cast doubt on those claims: For example, a government-wide $1 limit on spending cards has already hamstrung field operations; a pilot program for unannounced foreign inspections, meanwhile, has been paused because the staff who’d once secured translators have been fired. Dozens of employees with cross-cutting responsibilities, including those who wrote guidelines for inspectors or compared results across reviews, are gone.

The pharmaceutical industry — quiet, to date, about Kennedy’s potential impact on their business — now appears concerned: “The rapid and substantial changes at FDA  raise questions about the agency’s ability to fulfill its mission to bring new innovative medicines to patients,” a large industry group said after the cuts. Investors have been less ambiguous, with biotech stocks declining sharply after Kennedy’s announcement.

The health secretary has been called to testify before the Senate. He should explain how his cuts will protect American innovation and benefit patients. Otherwise, the public might reasonably conclude that the US is about to squander its hard-won dominance in drug development for no good reason.

— Bloomberg Opinion