ST. PAUL, Minn. — There are times when Wild coach Dean Evason wants to go into the dressing room between periods and scream at his team.
Cuss at them.
On Thursday against the Islanders, Evason came in almost joking.
He showed clips of the Wild dumping the puck in 10 feet on the other side of the red line.
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“Why would we do that?” he asked. “It doesn’t make sense.”
The Wild are in a good spot at the season’s midseason point, holding a seven-point lead for third place in the Central Division over the Blues and Cup champion Avalanche. You don’t get to this spot without being a good team, a talented team, a determined team. But what’s been puzzling and frustrating about the Wild is they’re also an inconsistent team. They know who they are — and how they have to play to be successful. They’ll say all the right things on the bench and between periods.
But how does a Wild team turn the puck over so much in Tuesday’s shootout loss to the Rangers and come in two nights later with a textbook, comeback win? GM Bill Guerin said it was like two different teams. Then the Wild had to hold on for dear life to beat the likely lottery-bound Coyotes 2-1 Saturday night at Xcel Energy Center?
“They do know, our team knows,” Evason said. “That’s the exciting part is we do know how to play the game right. It’s just about doing it consistently. Doing it on a more consistent basis will allow us to win more hockey games.”
If the Wild do it more consistently, perhaps it’ll encourage Guerin to be a more aggressive buyer at the trade deadline. If they can do it more consistently, that’s when they’ll be able to get out of the first round. Like Evason said, every game can be a learning situation, and Saturday was no different.
— Joe Smith (@JoeSmithNHL) January 15, 2023
It didn’t look pretty, that’s for sure. At times, the Wild tried to be too cute, like Jordan Greenway trying to toe-drag on a one-on-one rush. There were plenty of passes off skates. Minnesota is a better team than Arizona and should have been able to physically outmatch the Coyotes, yet spent most of the third period pinned in its own end. Sure, the Coyotes are a proud team, they’ll keep fighting, much like their last trip here.
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But if the Wild play like this on their upcoming four-game road trip against the Capitals, Hurricanes, Lightning and Panthers, it could get ugly.
“It wasn’t our best,” said Mats Zuccarello, who scored a power-play goal. “I don’t think we played up to our standard today. But, yeah, we’re lucky we got a win. We’ve got to take it and move forward.”
Part of the reason this game had an ugly feel was because of the game plan. Veteran forward Ryan Hartman said that during the pre-scout meeting Saturday morning coaches told them that — analytically — the Coyotes are last in the league in handling dump-ins.
“That was our game plan — dump the puck in the whole game,” Hartman said. “It might not have looked pretty, but that’s what we had to do tonight.”
So when it was 0-0 after a sleepy 20 minutes, Evason wasn’t ready to read his team the riot act. He wasn’t ticked. He preached patience — don’t deviate. Don’t get too cute, like they’ve been known to do.
“That’s all we talked about, just keep doing what we’re doing — don’t change,” Evason said. “It’s 0-0 — now it’s like don’t change, just stay the course, do what we think we need to do to have success. Don’t open it up. We’re not trying to get into a track meet. I don’t care who we’re playing or what the records are on the other side. It’s how we need to play, and the guys did that.”
The Wild finally broke through midway into the second period. They got around 80 seconds of a five-on-three power play, and Zuccarello delivered with a redirect from the slot on a slick centering feed from Kirill Kaprizov. The Wild power play had struggled on their recent two-game trip, so they hope this one could be a momentum boost.
🚨 Scoring for MINNESOTA 🚨pic.twitter.com/L8ULos0v7p
— Minnesota Wild (@mnwild) January 15, 2023
Then, less than a minute later, Freddy Gaudreau scored to make it 2-0 just after the power play ended. It was a heck of a play by Hartman, who baited goalie Connor Ingram out of the crease, then sent a pass to Gaudreau. “Just tried to bait him to get aggressive,” Hartman said. “Maybe thought about putting it in myself, but my momentum carried me too far down past the goal line. Just tried to find somebody.”
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Goaltending has been one of the Wild’s strengths after their rocky first couple of weeks, and Marc-Andre Fleury was “fantastic,” as Evason put it. Fleury made 27 saves, with 11 coming in the third period. The only goal he gave up came on a rebound that popped out to Lawson Crouse, who ripped the puck off Fleury’s helmet and in.
Fleury has seen his team try to find its consistency in games and between games, noting it sometimes takes someone leading by example on the ice as opposed to any speech in the room. He knows it’s a matter of time.
“I think we know — we talk about it,” Fleury said. “We have the right words between periods. Guys on the bench know. I think it’s just a matter of doing it for 60 minutes each night. It’ll come. You can see some games where we don’t have it, maybe, for 60 minutes. You know, we miss a period, or so. But, most of the time we have it, and if we can do it all the time, we’ll be in good shape.”
Guerin, in his midseason address Saturday morning, brought up how he and Evason spoke a lot over the summer on reshaping their identity for this season. They couldn’t count on being one of the league leaders in come-from-behind wins, they couldn’t always outscore their problems. “I think that’s one thing that held this team back last year in the playoffs,” Guerin said.
It was a big focal point to the team, demanding more from them when they have the lead, and Guerin believes the guys have bought in. Perhaps in that instance, Saturday’s win was another example of that progress. They took the lead and didn’t deviate from the plan. They bent, but they didn’t break.
The Wild improved to 17-0-1 when leading after two periods. They’re 9-5-4 in one-goal games.
“I like the way that we’re playing with the lead or in close games,” Guerin said. “Even if we’re down a goal, it’s not just break from everything and try to get a goal. You’ve got to stick with your game plan and trust it and know that it’ll get you that goal. And the other thing, too, is if we’re up by a lot — this is a personal pet peeve, but when you’re up by a lot — how do you play? If you’re up by four or five goals, it doesn’t become point night.
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“Because you start breaking from what you really are, you start going for points, you start cherry-picking and things like that — those are bad habits, and bad habits creep into your game easier than making good habits. I just find that the discipline that we have to have in each type of game is extremely important.”
(Photo of Marc-Andre Fleury making a save against Arizona’s Lawson Crouse in the third period Saturday: Matt Blewett / USA Today)