Hynes Has His Deal. The Roster Has to Hold Together.

The Wild made it official Tuesday: John Hynes gets a multiyear extension, and Minnesota's coaching situation is settled heading into training camp. That's a clean piece of organizational business. Hynes steadied this team through a 46-36 finish last season, and Guerin clearly decided continuity was worth locking in before camp opens.

The extension makes sense on paper. What it also does is raise the stakes on everything else that's still unsettled. Hynes can only coach the players who are healthy enough to be on the ice, and this offseason has been a sustained exercise in roster attrition. Gustavsson is day-to-day after hip surgery — which is better news than it was two weeks ago, but "day-to-day" is not "ready." Brodin, Bogosian, and Eriksson Ek have been out since late June. The blue line lost Klingberg to retirement last week. That's a lot of moving parts for a coach to manage before the first puck drops.

The optimistic read is that Hynes now has the organizational backing to build something real, and that the pieces — Coleman and Maatta added from Calgary, Faber logging nearly 25 minutes a night last season, Gustavsson potentially back sooner than expected — are close enough to contending that the extension is a reasonable bet. My read is simpler than that: the extension is fine, and the coaching is not the problem. The problem is whether this roster can stay intact long enough for Hynes to actually coach it.