ST. PAUL — Less than 15 months after hiring Paul Fenton as general manager, Minnesota Wild owner Craig Leipold changed his mind.

Still confident he has a contending team, Leipold decided to fire Fenton on Tuesday despite the unusual late-summer timing to try to redirect the franchise before it drifted further off track. The Wild’s six-year streak of making the playoffs ended in the spring.

“Our organization and our culture were a little different than the way Paul wanted to handle things. We just felt this was the time to do it,” Leipold said.

There was no “final straw,” the owner said, but rather a series of “smaller issues” that stacked up on his radar prior to the surprising move.

“It wasn’t a good fit. That was really it. The culture wasn’t the same,” Leipold said. “I didn’t have the same vibes with our employees in hockey ops, and I think the attitude of some of the players and all the people and the coaching and in the locker room and in the training room, it was just a feeling that we didn’t have the right leader for our organization.”

When Leipold picked Fenton to replace Chuck Fletcher there was no desire in the front office to embark on a significant rebuild, particularly in the NHL with a championship that is the most attainable of the major sports given the annual unpredictability of postseason play. Fenton initially obliged the owner’s belief that “tweaking” was all that needed to be done, but the three forward-for-forward trades he made before the deadline neither boosted the team’s chance of qualifying for the playoffs nor restocked the prospect pool while disassembling the once-promising core.

Ryan Donato showed flashes of productivity in his arrival from Boston for Charlie Coyle. Kevin Fiala is 4½ years younger, at least, than Mikael Granlund, the player who was shipped to Nashville in that deal.

Coyle thrived as the Bruins reached the Stanley Cup Final, though, as did Nino Niederreiter during Carolina’s surge to the Eastern Conference finals. Victor Rask, the underperforming center acquired from the Hurricanes for Niederreiter, still has three years at $4 million each remaining on his contract.