ST. PAUL — Travis Boyd was born in September of 1993, just a few months after Minnesota’s first NHL team loaded up 26 years of history and headed south down I-35 for a new home in north Texas.
As a kid in Hopkins, his hockey heroes were the Minnesota Gophers, for lack of a local NHL team until 2000, when the Wild brought the pro game back to the State of Hockey. Boyd’s biggest hockey goal was to be a Gopher, and he made that dream come true over a quartet of seasons at the U of M. His next goal was to play for the Wild, and after a mostly nomadic decade in pro hockey, he is back in his home state, with that opportunity before him.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Having at least one season with a chance to play for the Wild is something that I would imagine almost every Minnesota kid dreams of … to put that jersey on and skate out onto the ice with the announcer saying, ‘Here come your Minnesota Wild’” Boyd said, with a smile, after his first practice on the opening day of Wild training camp. “It gives me chills down the back of my neck right now, just thinking about it and reminds me how much it meant to me to play four years at the University of Minnesota.”
Things to prove in St. Paul
Having spent the previous three seasons with the Arizona Coyotes, Boyd turned in the first 82-game NHL season in 2022-23, with a career-high 19 assists. But last season, disaster struck in late November, via a serious upper body injury that required surgery and ended his season before the Christmas presents had even been wrapped.
He was ready to return to the ice by April, but amid all of the off-ice chaos that ended with the for Utah, Boyd didn’t crack the lineup. His two-part training camp goal in St. Paul, after signing a one-year contract for $775,000 with Minnesota on July 1, is to prove he’s healthy, and earn a spot on coach John Hynes’ roster.
“First and foremost is showing that I’m back from injury, that I’m at 100 percent. My big focus is going out there and getting back to who I am as a player,” Boyd said. “I essentially haven’t played competitive hockey in 10 months. I played in Da Beauty League but there’s no body contact, it’s 4-on-4 so that’s not real hockey. I haven’t been checked in 10 months, I haven’t worried about getting hit in 10 months, I haven’t had to worry about not turning the puck over. So it’s just getting back to being a hockey player. We just got done with day one, it went really well, and I’m really excited to get back out there, competing with the guys and playing real hockey again.”
Another thing he hasn’t had to worry about, in 2024 anyway, is moving. While the Boyds would spend State Fair time packing up and leaving Minnesota for Washington or Toronto or Phoenix in years’ past, that hassle was removed from this August’s to-do list.
“I haven’t had a chance to play in any games or anything, so the only thing about it that’s different is the fact that I haven’t had to pack up. I haven’t had to look for a place in a new city or worry about finding a school for my daughter or worry about anything like that. It’s been a little weird,” Boyd said. “We’ve even had neighbors on our street where we live in Edina coming up and asking, ‘Are you guys getting ready to leave anytime soon?’ It’s kind of fun to tell them I’m staying for the year.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Whether he stays with the team in St. Paul for the year or spends some time with their AHL affiliate in Iowa is yet to be determined, but thus far the Wild like what the local veteran, now 31, has shown.
“I think Travis has made a good first impression. He’s a guy that we brought into the organization to strengthen our depth,” Hynes said after two days of practices and scrimmages. “He’s one of those guys that could make the team out of camp or wind up in Iowa and get called up and maybe stick from there. I think he’s putting himself right in that mix and he’s doing a good job in camp so far.”
Sunshine and sadness
Boyd got a front row seat for the death throes of the Coyotes, who were sold and moved to Salt Lake City after playing last season in a 4,800-seat college arena at Arizona State. While NHL hockey had struggled to draw fans for years in the Phoenix metro area, Boyd played more than 170 games for the franchise and scoffs at the notion that hockey can’t flourish in the desert.
“Really strange and really unfortunate, honestly,” he said of the move to Utah. “I spent three years down there, and I think Arizona gets a bad rep around the league for not being a hockey city and not being a successful place for a NHL team. I would 100 percent disagree.”
Among the problems, Boyd noted, was the team’s former arena was state-of-the-art, but built far, far away from the core of the city, making it difficult for many fans to reach.
“I always tell people it would be like the Minnesota Wild playing up in Monticello. How many people are driving out there on a school night with their kids when they know they have a 45 or 50 minutes to an hour drive home after the game,” he asked, rhetorically. “There’s so much hockey being played out there. You go to any of the rinks out there and they’re packed from six in the morning until midnight, so it was unfortunate.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Family and familiarity
With those troubles behind him, Boyd is back home, close to his parents and his in-laws, and thankful for the occasional help watching their two young girls.
“Having a family and being from here, the nice thing is that now we have two kids, my parents still live in my childhood home, my wife’s parents still live in theirs, we have plenty of help here, we don’t have to look for babysitters,” he said, adding that there are contingency plans if he ends up in in Des Moines at any point during the coming season. “It’s also close if one thing comes to another and I’m not able to stay up with the Wild all year, I’m still close enough where it’s not across the country. It’s just a few hours drive down.”
Boyd returns to Minnesota after the departure of Vinni Lettieri, another local kid and former Gopher who enjoyed the comforts of home last season before heading to Boston via free agency. The Wild’s coach sees some parallels in Boyd’s case, of a local kid looking to make his mark in familiar surroundings.
“The reality is that they have family and friends here, and to play in the NHL in your hometown, how many people get an opportunity to do that?” Hynes said. “It was great for Vinni, and hopefully Boyder continues doing what he’s doing, making a strong push for himself and we’ll see where it goes.”
To start, surrounded by family, it will go back home to the Minneapolis suburbs, to the place it all started, each night that the Wild are at home. For Travis Boyd, that and a chance to play are good enough for now.
ADVERTISEMENT
The Trust Project
