Minnesota Wild 2022-23 season preview: Playoff chances, point projections,

Two straight exciting seasons for the Wild. Two straight first-round disappointments. It’s always the same story for Minnesota sports: Even the most exciting teams find a way to let you down.

Maybe that’s not totally fair for this team — they didn’t enter either season with the highest expectations — but given their performance, it felt like they deserved a bit more in the playoffs.

Perhaps the third time’s the charm in the Kirill Kaprizov era. Even though last season didn’t end as many hoped it would, the team’s regular-season performance spoke volumes about where the club currently stands: The Wild are a legitimate contender.

Since Kaprizov’s arrival, this model has been a huge fan of what the Wild have been doing — sometimes to an overzealous degree. That’s not stopping anytime soon as the Wild enter the season with a strong chance of being one of the league’s very best teams.

The Wild have arrived.

The projection

As is usually the case, the model loves the Minnesota Wild. That’s been the case in each of the last two seasons, both of which the Wild have over-performed in, and that’s not changing this year either. Oddsmakers tab the Wild as a 100-point team, and the model continues to be as bullish as always. There are some that joke that this model is a Leafs homer — a byproduct of the person who developed it. But that is false — this model, for the last two years anyway, bleeds forest green.

And so that means the most optimistic projection yet for the Wild: 106 points and a one-in-10 shot at winning it all. It’s a massive jump from last year’s 97.