Wild sign head coach John Hynes to multi-year extension
The Minnesota Wild have agreed to terms on a multi-year contract extension with head coach John Hynes, the club announced Tuesday morning.
Hynes, 51, has served as the head coach in Minnesota for the past three seasons, guiding the Wild to the playoffs in the last two, and was slated to coach the final year of his contract in 2026-27. During his tenure, the Wild have compiled a 125-78-24 record, good for a .604 points percentage.
In the 2025-26 season, the Wild finished in third place in the Central Division with a 46-24-12 record and 104 points in 82 games. Led by Quinn Hughes, Kirill Kaprizov, Matt Boldy, and Jesper Wallstedt, the Wild defeated the Dallas Stars four games to two in the first round of the 2026 Stanley Cup Playoffs before falling to the Colorado Avalanche in the Western Conference semifinals.
The Wild hired Hynes on Nov. 27, 2023, the same day that they relieved previous head coach Dean Evason of his duties behind the bench. Hynes was unable to lead the Wild to a playoff berth in 2023-24 but helped them return to the upper echelon of the Central Division in the two seasons that followed.
Hynes previously served as a head coach for two other NHL clubs before joining the Wild. After a five-year tenure as head coach of the AHL’s Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins, Hynes joined the New Jersey Devils in the same capacity in 2015, spending parts of five seasons with the club and helping them to a surprise playoff berth in 2018.
After being fired by the Devils in December of 2019, Hynes became head coach of the Nashville Predators just over a month later. He presided over the Predators for parts of four seasons, but the team never made it out of the first round before he was fired in 2023.
In total, Hynes has coached 829 NHL games over parts of 11 seasons with the Devils, Predators, and Wild, posting a 409-333-87 record (and a .546 points percentage); in the playoffs, his teams have gone 11-25 with one series win. A product of Warwick, Rhode Island, Hynes ranks fourth among all U.S.-born head coaches in career games coached and wins.
