The Minnesota Wild’s President and General Manager Doug Risebrough and Head Coach Jacques Lemaire announced that Marian Gaborik will serve as team captain for the month of March.

The Wild like to rotate the captaincy month to month rather than picking one player for the job and waiting until the end of his career to pick another. Some purists believe that this is wrong, and that you don't have a true leader if you change captains all the time.

But the Wild pick a captain each month based upon who has shown the greatest leadership qualities. This will be Gaborik’s first month of captaincy, even though he was the first pick ever for the Minnesota Wild in the 2000 NHL Entry Draft.

Gaborik leads the Wild this season with 64 points in 60 games. He is a team best plus 11 and six game winning tallies. He is the Wild’s all-time leader in games played with 468, goals scored with 197 and most points with 395. He also is the team leader with most power play goal (53), game winning goals (39) and a plus-minus of +45.

Out of the last five months there have been only 4 captains with Nick Schultz wearing the “C” of his jersey for the months of January and February. Mark Parrish had December and Brian Rolston wore it in November and Pavol Demitra wore it for October.

Wild Notes

The Wild organization sent e-mail responses to fans who contacted the team regarding its latest acquisition of Chris Simon. Explaining to them that they could not send all of their e-mails to Wild management, but a large number have been forwarded to them and the department is aware of the fans’ concerns.

In response to all of this, Simon says he just wants a chance to prove that he can still play hockey within the rules and wants to help the team make it to the Stanley Cup Finals.

Mark Parrish has been battling the flu and should make it back in action against Los Angeles on Sunday.