Can Greg Cronin Fix the Wild’s Development Pipeline? – Minnesota Wild

No one can say the Iowa Wild lacks the talent to find success.

Last season, Iowa regularly iced four recent first-round picks: Jesper Wallstedt, Carson Lambos, David Jiříček, and Liam Öhgren. If you also want to list their second-rounders, you can throw in Ryan O’Rourke, Jack Peart, and Hunter Haight. There’s something there. 

But instead of going on a Calder Cup run, these prospects toiled on an Iowa team that finished with the third-worst points percentage in the AHL. Were there bright spots? Of course. Öhgren finished the season with 19 goals and 37 points in 41 games. Haight scored 20 goals as an AHL rookie, a feat only Sammy Walker has duplicated in Iowa history, and Walker was two years older than Haight. 

Still, we didn’t see much development from these skilled young prospects, or at least, not that we can measure. Lambos and 2023 third-rounder Caedan Bankier earned more trust in their roles, but that didn’t correspond to a leap in production. Wallstedt famously struggled. Jiříček went from scoring 10 goals and 30 points in 44 games for the Cleveland Monsters in 2023-24 (including playoffs) to zero goals and seven assists in 27 games with Iowa. O’Rourke and rookie Peart failed to gain traction. 

Brett McLean was the coach overseeing the program for the past two seasons. However, he caught on with the Vancouver Canucks NHL staff, leaving Iowa in need of a new coach. They got their man on Monday, announcing that former Anaheim Ducks bench boss Greg Cronin will take the reins in Des Moines. 

The thinking is easy to decipher here. Iowa is in the dumps, and Cronin is an experienced coach with plenty of AHL success. During his stints with the Bridgeport Sound Tigers (New York Islanders affiliate, 2003-05) and Colorado Eagles (Colorado Avalanche affiliate, 2018-23), Cronin has made the playoffs five times. He also has a deep background in player development, having helped the US National Development program get off its feet in the ’90s.

Any help on the player development front is welcome. Minnesota has successfully gotten its top draft picks out of the AHL, namely Matt Boldy and Marco Rossi. However, there are not a ton of homegrown success stories beyond them. Brock Faber came straight from college to the NHL, and the Wild haven’t gotten bottom-six help from young AHLers since Connor Dewar, Brandon Duhaime, and Mason Shaw came up around the same time in the early 2020s.

The spigot of talent running through Iowa isn’t about to run dry, either. Riley Heidt is the Wild’s 2023 second-rounder and will be in Des Moines after he had 68 goals and 207 points in 126 games over his past two WHL seasons. Big-bodied second-round winger Rasmus Kumpulainen (eight goals, 16 points in 48 games in the Finnish Liiga) might also make the jump. Don’t forget about the possibility that Michigan State’s Charlie Stramel might get an AHL stint after the college season, either. 

Minnesota’s got a skilled group, but that’s nothing without a development structure that can refine raw talent into NHL players. Getting Iowa back to respectability is a major piece of Cronin’s job. Still, with the sheer quantity of prospects on the roster, that likely won’t happen unless Cronin can get more out of this group.

His nearly four decades of experience should give fans some hope, but his recent track record with developing talented young players is… mixed. The Ducks were coming out of a long, hard rebuild and had a lot of young talent to show for it. In terms of 25-and-under first-round picks, Cronin was charged with developing Leo Carlsson (2nd overall, 2023), Mason McTavish (3rd, 2022), Trevor Zegras (9th, 2019), Pavel Mintyukov (10th, 2022), and Isac Lundestrom (23rd, 2018). Add in high second-rounders in Olen Zellweger (34th, 2021) and Jackson LaCombe (39th, 2019), the assignment is clear: Development, development, development. 

We might see the seeds of what Cronin did in Anaheim sprout in later years, but if we’re judging by year-to-year improvement during his tenure, he doesn’t quite shine with the Ducks. Let’s take a look at how each prospect performed in their first and second years under Cronin, using Points/60 and Expected Goal% at 5-on-5:

Leo Carlsson:

2023-24: 1.22 P/60; 49.9% xG
2024-25: 1.70 P/60; 45.1% xG

Mason McTavish:

2023-24: 1.93 P/60; 45.5% xG
2024-25: 2.16 P/60; 44.9% xG

Trevor Zegras:

2023-24: 1.87 P/60; 51.5% xG
2024-25: 1.92 P/60; 42.9% xG

Pavel Mintyukov:

2023-24: 0.96 P/60; 46.0% xG
2024-25: 0.92 P/60; 43.2% xG

Isac Lundestrom:

2023-24: 1.02 P/60; 50.3% xG
2024-25: 0.58 P/60; 40.3% xG

Olen Zellweger:

2023-24: 0.84 P/60; 41.8% xG
2024-25: 0.74 P/60; 45.8% xG

Jackson LaCombe:

2023-24: 0.60 P/60; 45.5% xG
2024-25: 1.31 P/60; 48.8% xG

Of those seven, you can really only say that LaCombe was the only one who took a big leap forward under Cronin. There’s also the idea that, even by Cronin’s admission, “I was too hard and reactionary at times my first year” in Anaheim. How much you want to make of the outside scuttlebutt over that point is up to you.

Still, it’s worth pointing out that we didn’t see much growth in Anaheim and that Iowa general manager Matt Hendricks considers the 62-year-old Cronin’s approach positive. “I know Greg will be a very demanding coach,” he told The Athletic’s Michael Russo and Joe Smith.

Even while Cronin had success in the Avalanche system, Colorado didn’t have a great AHL-to-NHL pipeline during that time. 2018 first-round pick Martin Kaut played a grand total of 47 games with the Avs, despite developing under Cronin for 173 games. Shane Bowers, a 2017 first-round pick from the Ottawa Senators acquired via the Matt Duchene trade, couldn’t deliver on his power forward potential. Third-round projects like Sampo Ranta (16 NHL games) and Jean-Luc Foudy (13 NHL games) didn’t become regulars, either.

Even the successes are qualified. Cronin got 18 games over two seasons to work with Alex Newhook, a first-rounder in 2019. But the speedy winger turned into an average-ish third-line winger. Justin Barron (25th overall, 2020) and Conor Timmins (32nd overall, 2017) each got around 50 games with Cronin, but both have become replaceable third-pairing defensemen.

Logan O’Connor is the only major hit among that group. He’s an undrafted free agent who has become arguably the best defensive winger in the league. Still… the Wild will have to hope for more than the next coming of Marcus Foligno in their pipeline, as awesome as it would be to see, say, Bankier develop into an O’Connor-caliber player.

Maybe this is all misleading, and Cronin’s approach will work for a Wild organization dedicated to an old-school mentality. Perhaps all these prospects need to succeed is a structured system and a coach who always demands attention to detail. If you’re a Wild fan, you must hope so, because any contender needs young, cheap talent. But Cronin will have to prove that he can not only squeeze wins out of the Iowa Wild but also take a team with a lot of youngsters who’ve done a lot of losing and turn them into players who can win in St. Paul.