The Wild officially left camp with three goalies on Monday, keeping rookie Jesper Wallstedt on the opening night roster for Thursday’s 7 p.m. puck drop against Columbus at Xcel Energy Center.

After two years in the American Hockey League, and three NHL starts last season, Jesper Wallstedt is a part of the 23-man roster, joining veterans Filip Gustavsson and Marc-Andre Fleury. It’s rare for an NHL team to keep three goaltenders on the roster, much less take three into the season opener.

So, now what?

“It’s always going to be a complicated answer because we have three guys,” head coach John Hynes said. “I would say, right now, we have three goalies on the team.”

Not only did Wallstedt carve out a space during camp, on Monday he signed a two-year contract extension worth $4.4 million and kicking in next season, a clear indication that Minnesota expects him to be a part of the team’s regular tandem in 2025-26. But that’s next year. For now, Wallstedt is on a two-way deal, and Hynes and his staff must figure out a way to keep three goaltenders engaged, practicing and at least relatively happy.

Gustavsson, who has two more years left on a contract paying him $3.75 million annually, started last season as the No. 1 goalie and made eight more starts than Fleury but overall wasn’t as successful. Fleury, on a one-year, $2.5 million deal, is playing what he says is the last of 21 NHL seasons.

“At the end of the day, I want to try to help the team as much as I can to get some wins and enjoy it in the meantime,” Fleury said when camp started on Sept. 19. “Work hard, get the guys going. Whatever it is.”

Gustavsson was more cryptic.

“If they tell me to play,” he said. “I play.”

All three goalies have looked good in camp and during preseason starts, each making his share of big saves while the Wild went 4-2. But as Hynes noted on Monday, “Two guys are on one-way contracts, one guy’s not.”

“You want to make sure you’re playing the guys that are gonna help you win, and coming out of camp, we feel like all three have played well,” Hynes said. “So, that in itself makes it difficult. Then again, you have to manage the roster.”

The Wild are still dealing with a $14.7 million in dead salary cap space from the Zach Parise and Ryan Suter buyouts, so keeping three goalies and staying under the NHL’s $88 million cap will be difficult — even with one making making $925,000 on the last year of his entry level deal.

So in some sense, Wallstedt’s immediate future is tied to the health of his teammates. He has officially moved to Minneapolis and plans to stay in the team’s hotel when he is inevitably — barring injury — shifted back to Des Moines.

“You still understand there may be times you have to go down based on schedule, et cetera, for sure,” he said. “And that’s nothing I can do anything about. I control what I can control and I focus on what I can do. I put in the effort that makes (the coaching staff’s) job harder.

“For sure, I want to be here, and hopefully make a case that I’m not the guy they’re sending down … if that situation would happen. Hopefully I could put in the effort and put up the results that they feel that they want to keep me instead of someone else.”

But it can’t be someone else, and if Wallstedt makes the case he wants to make, the Wild have a problem, albeit maybe the kind of problem teams don’t mind having. After two home games to start the season, the Wild have seven road games starting Sunday in Winnipeg, the second of back-to-backs, and play four games in the season’s first six days.

“You’re always putting in the lineup you think is going to give you the best chance to win, and saying that, we think we’ve had a lot of guys that deserve to play,” Hynes said. “Some of it will be performance-based when the regular season starts, and then we’ll just have to make decisions from there.”

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