That is a very interesting trade with Ottawa, just not sure if Minny can afford to resign him

I think they can... Ennis 4,6M out, Dumba RFA who should get 6M/y out, Coyle at 3,2M= 14M in saving... giving 11M to Karlsson should work!
Fair trade for Ottawa as well IMO getting 2 good additions

I kinda like that OTT trade as well. ^ That being said, anything involving Karlsson, OTT would need a 2019 1st coming back their way. They presently don't have one and they'll clearly need it if they're going to be doing a fulll rebuild...

I like the idea of getting rid of Ennis and sending him to MTL, but I doubt even Marc Bergevin would take Ennis' salary and give away 3rd round pick. IMHO, for this trade to happen, either MIN would have to accept lower round pick (6/7th round) or they would have to retain part of his salary.
The move for E Karlsson is surely brave, but I have doubts here. MIN has struggled with depth last season and their 3rd and 4th line were genuinely poor. Trading away Coyle only make this issue bigger.
Another thing is, that with Suter and Parise having 7 years left on their awful contracts, giving another 8/9M per year to Karlsson (that would be the range he would look for, I think) takes away almost 25M for only 3 players (2 of them are already declining) for a long period of time. That won't end well.
Overall, I like the work with RFA signings and sending Ennis to MTL, but I think Wild cannot afford to get E Karlsson and would have to look someplace else if they want a blockbuster this summer.

I understand where you're coming from, the group of Staal, Parise, Dubnyk, Suter, Koivu are all on the wrong side of 30, and if they want to win with these guys I thought bringing in elite talent on the back end could help the young guys coming in boost their production. Suter and Karlsson each playing 25 minutes would be scary for opponents. How is it that Suter is declining when he tied a career best in points?

The reasoning about aging core is good, yes, they probably can go all in now or acknowledge they will never win a cup with this group of players. So even though I don't like this style of building teams (I prefer younger, more dynamic and well-round builds of squads) I understand your point of view.
My comment about decline of Suter might seem weird, but from what I've seen this season and last season, he is becoming more error-prone on the blue line and his play is getting riskier. This results in an improvment in points total (from 40 to 51). However, he tallied 11 more PPPs this year -> he didn't improve his point production in 5-on-5 situation and his +/- got dramatically worse (from +34 to -1). Obviously, this isn't only Suter's fault, but in my opinion, the best we can hope for, is that he won't get worse quickly. I genuinely don't see him improving at this age.