The Minnesota Wild have a winger. The winger is big, skilled, leads the team in points, leads the team in goals, drives puck possession and does all that against solid opposition.
The problem is that the winger is Dany Heatley.
Heatley was acquired from the San Jose Sharks in the offseason specifically to revert to his 40-goal form and lead a postseason run; instead, the Minnesota Wild, after a hot start had them atop the Western Conference as late as Dec. 18, have crashed and burned out of the postseason picture.
Heatley, 31, arrived in Minnesota via a one-for-one July trade with the Sharks that sent winger Martin Havlat to San Jose. Coming off a 26-goal second season for the Sharks that ended with a loss in the Western Conference finals, Heatley was determined to more resemble the guy that had back to-back 50-goal seasons for the Ottawa Senators in 2005-06 and 2006-07.
Heatley, who was born in Germany while his father played professionally there and holds dual Canadian and German citizenship, expected it. The Wild expected it.
"As a goal scorer and a player, you want to be that guy," Heatley told reporters after the trade.
In 2010-11, he struggled with several injuries and stayed in the lineup for more than a month with a broken hand.
"Last year wasn't the greatest year for me personally, but I'm looking forward to getting back there," Heatley said.
Wild GM Chuck Fletcher acquired Heatley, along with winger Devin Setoguchi in a separate trade with San Jose, to pump up an offense that, in 2010-11, simply didn't get the puck on net enough—they ranked last in the NHL in shots (26.2 per game) and 26th in goals (2.48 per game).
"Our lack of goal-scoring is well documented. Our inability to shoot the puck is well documented," Fletcher said after the trade. "We've acquired two players who are able to complement the players on our team real well."
While Heatley hasn't been bad—again, 20-goal forwards with his peripheral stats don't exactly grow on trees—he simply hasn't done what Fletcher openly believed he would.
Minnesota remains, to its detriment, a low shot-volume team, and its success at the beginning of the season has been increasingly exposed as a mirage. Statistically oriented observers called it out, based on the fact that teams that shoot as little as the Wild do not score enough goals to win enough games to truly contend.
When Heatley scored his 20th goal of the season on March 1, the Wild were in their customary position: last in goal-scoring and last in shots per game. It wasn't until three weeks later that Heatley netted his 21st goal of the season, on Thursday against Calgary. Three weeks later, not much has changed; Minnesota remains the league's worst offensive team, though center Mikko Koivu's pending return should help matters.
The issue is a familiar one for anyone who has tracked Heatley's career: How much personal blame does he bear for his team's failings? In the past, that question has taken a different form—with the Sharks and Senators, Heatley was, in some respects, expected to win titles. With the Wild, the expectation was that he'd help them make the postseason for the first time since 2008. And despite the volatile nature of the Western Conference playoff picture, that's not going to happen in 2012.
Heatley's individual lack of production this season lies mainly in a low shooting percentage. His 9.5 mark represents a career low and the continuation of a downward trend that began in 2007-08 with the Senators, when his percentage went from a career-high 18.3 to 15.1. At that point, the drop was on: He went from 15.1 to, in his first season with San Jose after demanding a trade, 13.9. Then he went from 13.9 to 12.0 in 2010-11.
The Wild, though, are playing Heatley against significantly more difficult even-strength competition than he'd faced with the Sharks, who used other forwards, like Joe Pavelski and Logan Couture, against better opponents.
Using behindthenet.ca's Corsi QualComp stat, which measures shots (including those blocked and missed) directed at the attacking net, subtracted by all those attempted on the defensive net, Heatley has faced the second-most difficult even-strength competition among Minnesota's forwards and 10th-most difficult competition of all NHL forwards with at least 50 or more games played in 2011-12.
In his last season with the Sharks, Heatley's QualComp ranking: sixth among San Jose's forwards and 280th overall. Given that, and the fact that he generates more shots than any other member of the Wild, he remains an objectively useful player and has, in a few ways, been better this season than last.
That's still a departure from Heatley's stated goal in the fall, when he was open about his desire to show that he was still capable of scoring at an elite level and, implicitly, earning his elite paycheck; his $7.5 million cap hit, which runs through the 2013-14 season, is tied with four others for the seventh-largest in the NHL.
"I hate talking like that, like, 'I'm so motivated,'" Heatley told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in early October. "You ever watch (HBO's) '24/7' where the boxer's like, 'I'm so motivated, I'm in the best shape of my life?' and then the champ knocks him out in the first round?"
"But yeah, inside me, there's definitely that. You want to prove to everybody, and to your new teammates, and to your new city and fans, that you're the same player you always were."
For the Wild, the question is whether the player he's become, and the player they've put him in position to be, is enough.