The Wild will begin training camp on Thursday, their first with head coach John Hynes, who replaced Dean Evason in late November with the Wild on a 5-10-2 skid and led the team to a 34-24-4 finish.

He’s eager to lay the groundwork for some schemes he wasn’t able to apply on the fly last season.

“To start fresh with it is always an advantage,” said Hynes, who had head coaching jobs in New Jersey and Nashville before coaching his first game in Minnesota on Nov. 28 last fall. “I think if you can take advantage of training camp, with how you teach and the ability to drill in the things you want to have when the season starts, there’s no better time.”

The transition will be immediate for a team that missed the playoffs for just the second time in 12 seasons, starting with a scrimmage Thursday morning at TRIA Rink. The team plays its first preseason game on Saturday in Winnipeg.

With key players back from injuries — Jared Spurgeon and Marcus Foligno each had season-ending surgeries, and Jonas Brodin was limited to 62 games — Hynes has the option not only to change things for a bad penalty kill and middling power play, but with line combinations.

After a phenomenal rookie season for Brock Faber (which earned him an eight-year, $68 million contract extension), Hynes has a deep blue line led by Brodin, Faber and Spurgeon — who played only 16 games last season because of hip and back injuries — that also includes veterans Jake Middleton and Zach Bogosian.

The team also added center Yakov Trenin in free agency, giving them a hard, reliable third- or fourth-line center who can kill penalties.

Here is an early look at what the Wild need to figure out before their regular-season starts Oct. 10 against Evason and the Columbus Blue Jackets at Xcel Energy Center.

Who’s ready?

The Wild were bedeviled by injuries from the start last season. Spurgeon was lost in a preseason game, and Matt Boldy, Alex Goligoski and Freddy Gaudreau were lost on the team’s first road trip.

It didn’t really get any better from there. Spurgeon played only 16 games. Foligno was compromised by a core injury he finally had repaired, and Brodin broke an arm after getting cheap-shotted by Evander Kane. Mats Zuccarello and Kirill Kaprizov missed time, as well.

But Hynes said everyone will enter Thursday’s camp healthy.

“Everyone coming in should be fine. Everyone’s been skating, no one’s been limited when they had their captains practices and all that,” he said. “Everyone’s been full go, so I would anticipate, barring anything that happens unexpectedly, that come Thursday, we’ll have everybody on the ice — full go.”

Penalty kill

The Wild’s penalty kill was pretty much a disaster from the get-go last season, finishing 30th among 32 NHL teams with a 74.5 percent success rate. It’s essentially impossible to imagine the Wild making the playoffs in the spring if that doesn’t get considerably better.

Hynes said he and his staff spent a lot of their summer discussing the PK. Now, they have a chance to really improve it.

“We spent a lot of time on it, things that we would want to do, tactically, a little bit different,” Hynes said this week. “Also, I think, it comes down to, first and foremost, an attitude and an identity from the penalty killers that needs to be stronger, more committed to get the job done. It will certainly be an emphasis in camp, and it was an emphasis in the offseason, as well.”

Who will Spurgeon play with?

Spurgeon, the team’s captain and one of the NHL’s best puck-moving defensemen, was hurt in a preseason game at Chicago last fall, essentially killing his season. He returned at half speed, then was hurt again before having season-ending surgeries in February and March.

His presence, and Faber’s acclimation to the NHL, gives the Wild exciting pairing possibilities on the blue line to create a shut-down pair and depth. With camp starting, where will Spurgeon fit best?

“As long as everything goes well, I would think he’s going to be a good possibility to start with Middleton,” Hynes said. “We’ve got a lot of time to figure that out, but that would certainly be an option that we know works.”

Who’s with first?

Maybe Hynes’ biggest job in camp, and this year in general, is making a team with little turnover deeper than it was last season.

“At least in my time here, there were certain players that really carried the team and drove the load for the most part,” Hynes said, “and we were able to win more than we lost but it wasn’t good enough. So, how do we get that better? It comes back to combinations, how you use different people.”

That most likely means, he said, breaking up the top line of Kirill Kaprizov, Joel Eriksson Ek and Matt Boldy, the most productive combination down the stretch last season.

“I just think a fresh slate for different players, trying some different combinations to see if we can be a deeper and harder team to play against,” he said.

So, who will be the first center to get a chance?

“We’ll probably start (Ryan) Hartman there, to start,” Hynes said. “But, like I said, the reality of it is, we don’t have everything set, and we’re going to start with certain guys in certain positions. But there will be changes. Even if a group comes out and plays really well for a few practices, and we love them, we know we also have to give other guys opportunities.

“So, we’ll start that way, but we’ll also look at Marco (Rossi) there, and maybe an Ek, and see Marco or Hartzy with other guys. But we’ll see how it goes.”

A number of training camp practices at TRIA Rink will be open to the public. Fans need to register at www.wild.com/openpractices to attend an open practice session.

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