Guerin Gets His Extension. Now Comes the Hard Part.

Bill Guerin signed a multiyear contract extension as Minnesota's general manager on Tuesday, which settles the front office picture just as the organization heads into what might be its most consequential offseason in years. Hynes is locked in. Guerin is locked in. The structure is stable. What isn't stable is the roster underneath it.

The list of unresolved items is not short. Quinn Hughes is in camp without an extension, and while he's said publicly he's not worried about getting a deal done, that's a franchise-defenseman contract that hasn't been signed. Calvin Pickard is the only goaltender who logged meaningful time, with nothing behind him — a thin situation that got thinner when Cam Talbot landed in Columbus. And at left wing, Nick Foligno is 38 years old and listed as the starter at a position where the depth chart behind him is essentially empty. Those three things together represent a real offseason workload for a front office that just got its paperwork in order.

The forward core gives Guerin something to work with. Kaprizov and Boldy each finished at 55 points, and the secondary scoring from Johansson and Eriksson Ek was a genuine step forward from what this team had the year before. The bones are good. But my read is that the Hughes situation is the one with a clock on it — every week of camp that passes without a deal is a week closer to a harder conversation, and Guerin is now the guy who has to have it.