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"All the hockey guys we talked to—Mark Hunter, Bill, Mellanby, Brian Lawton, Basil McRae, Ron Hextall, Peter Chiarelli, the common denominator is they broke the Wild down all similar," Modano said. "They catego- rized the players and the per- sonnel the same, they all had the same ideas and thoughts on what to do moving forward with this group. Across the board, they probably all said the same thing. "Then it came down to personality. Scott's a real quiet guy. Reminds me of Bob Gainey. Billy's more charis- matic, boisterous. I just said to Craig, 'It's more or less who you could mesh well with, who you could see yourself working with on a daily basis to piece this thing back together.' We all said, 'That's Billy.'" Two-Way Player As much as Modano loves learning the business side under Leipold and Majka, he says he talks to Guerin on a daily basis to help plan the future of the Wild. "I'm lucky I get to bounce back and forth between roles," said Modano, who will also run the Mike Modano Fantasy Camp with a number of other ex-local NHLers in March. Guerin has quite the chal- lenge ahead of him in rebuild- ing an aging Wild team that doesn't have a huge prospect pipeline nor a lot of star power on the NHL roster. "He's been really level-head- ed about it," Modano said of Guerin. "He knew what he was acquiring. No mystery what he was coming into. He inherited this situation. He knows he'll have a big hand how this thing all works out and it'll be strict- ly because of what he does. … Coming in and breaking some- thing down and building it back up, you love the challenge of putting the puzzle together and creating a winning team." Problem Child For Modano, when he was 5 or 6 years old, nobody could ever have envisioned he'd become a hockey player, let alone one of the best to ever play the sport. You see, Modano was a trou- blemaker as a child. "It got to a point where my parents didn't have an answer to anything," Modano admits. "We saw a couple child psychol- ogists to peel the onion back to see what's going on with this kid, why's he getting in trouble, F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 0 | M H J ON L I N E . C O M 29 P R E S E N T E D B Y "Heard you were a farmer," was Modano's one-liner in the cult classic movie, The Mighty Ducks. why is he just spouting off, why is he getting kicked out of school. I mean, he's a bully, he just picks on kids. "I mean, everything that you could think about what the worst kid is, I was that. I don't know what it was. … I couldn't keep my attention span for nothing. I played baseball. … I wasn't really into soccer, wasn't really into anything else. "I was just in trouble. I just couldn't find some sort of release." One day Modano's dad was complaining about his son's outbursts to a friend, Jack Rankin, and Rankin suggested to Modano's dad that he take his son ice skating. Michael Modano Sr. was a Boston guy, so Bruins games sometimes appeared on the TV in the Modano household. Being in Detroit, they also got Hockey Night in Canada, so hockey wasn't foreign to the young Modano, who was 7 at the time. WILD.COM/FSN