How Will Wild spend?

With Niklas Backstrom an almost sure lock as the Minnesota Wild’s starting goalie next year, it’s going to be interesting to see what the Wild do with Manny Fernandez, who is due to receive $4.5 million next year. I certainly don’t want to see the Wild paying a bench player that much money, but it would be sweet to have a solid backup for Backstrom. If the Wild is not going to pay Fernandez next season and move him in a trade, the Wild would be able to apply their free cap space a little more liberally during the offseason on hot free agents the way they did in the last offseason. I think it would help to surround the core Wild players of Bryan Rolston, Marian Gaborik and Pavol Demitra with some additional talent, perhaps a scoring defenseman.