Strange! Spend all this time trying to attach Ennis to a Zucker, Nino or Spurg trade... then buy him out and sign Hamburglar, Hendricks, Fehr and Pateryn??? Hoping for Wild fans they can get youth in a trade.

Got a good fourth line and a great deal on yet another defensively solid defenseman, not like this team needed any more. Looks fine to me. Why buy out Ennis when they could do all this and be under the cap with him, though? More to come?

Yes. We've been waiting for a while now for a trade to get done. If Dumba asks for more money than he's worth, he'll likely be traded. Zucker, Nino, and Coyle are also heavily rumored. Our beat writer is pretty much convinced Nino will be traded at some point. He said there's too many people talking about trading for him for nothing to happen. Lots of speculation (on our end mostly) that we're trying to work a trade with Toronto. Depending on who we get from them and who we give up, we might be right against the cap.

Worst case, we take our $14+ million in cap space, spend $10-11 million to re-sign Zucker and Dumba then either go into the year with a cushion or see if there's any free agents left on the market we might want. Last year we signed Winnik to a contract less than an hour before the team boarded a plane to Detroit for the season opener after we had him on a PTO.