Wild star week-to-week with upper-body injury

The Minnesota Wild were left reeling in more ways than one Saturday when they ate a 7-4 loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs. Key secondary scorer Matt Boldy suffered an upper-body injury that night, and Wild GM Bill Guerin revealed Monday that Boldy will miss time as a result. Per The Athletic’s Michael Russo, the injury timeline is week to week and “not an LTIR situation but will know more when they get home.”

Boldy got hurt in the third period of Saturday’s loss when he crashed into the boards awkwardly after taking a hit from Maple Leafs defenseman Morgan Rielly.

The loss of Boldy, 22, is a huge blow for a Wild team that was already hurting for scoring depth. After an impressive 2021-22 rookie season in which he collected 15 goals and 39 points in 47 games, Boldy broke out for 31 goals and 63 points last season, including a torrid finish in which he buried 15 goals in his final 19 games. The Wild took Boldy 12^th overall in the 2019 draft, hoping he’d blossom into one of the better goal scorers in the game, and he had indeed been trending that way.

Minnesota will continue relying on superstar Kirill Kaprizov and linemates Ryan Hartman and Mats Zuccarello to carry their offense, but losing Boldy, their second-best goal scorer, stings badly given how little Guerin has been able to add to the team’s scoring up front. They already traded away Kevin Fiala as a cap casualty during the 2022 offseason, and with the cap penalties for buying out Zach Parise and Ryan Suter ballooning to more than $14 million this season, Minnesota couldn’t add any high-impact pieces. They desperately need improvement from within, and that included counting on Boldy to level up again, perhaps to a 40-goal threat.

The injury doesn’t sound like it’ll sideline Boldy for months, but even weeks without him will be tough to stomach for a team that doesn’t have much margin for error in the Central Division this season.