SCHREIER: Process, Production and the Perplexing Start of the Minnesota Wild Season

Written by Tom Schreier

The simple fact is…we know that we can be a contender, we know that if we do what we’re supposed to do, then we can have a chance to win the Stanley Cup. In the same breath, we know that we can miss the playoffs looking at our division, looking at our conference.  

— Wild head coach Mike Yeo, 10/6/14

Mike Yeo nailed it. Going into the season, the Minnesota Wild head coach knew where his team stands: On paper, this team could win a Stanley Cup (seriously!), but everyone knows that things rarely happen like they are supposed to on paper. Nobody expected Josh Harding, potentially the Wild’s No. 1 goaltender going into the season, would injure himself in an altercation with a teammate. Nobody expected most of the defensive corps to get the mumps. Nobody expected Thomas Vanek to struggle to score goals, or Mikko Koivu to struggle to set up his teammates, or the power play to lack, well, power.

On the flip side, Nino Niederreiter has been called a bust because he did not immediately live up to expectations as a teenager on the New York Islanders, and through 20 games he’s Minnesota’s leading goal-scorer. The Wild wanted to sign Darcy Kuemper to a 2-way contract at the beginning of the season in order to allow him to play in Iowa at a reduced rate, but had their hand forced when Harding got hurt and all Kuemper has done since receiving his 2-year deal is shut teams down (outside of a bad performance against the Buffalo Sabres, which wasn’t entirely his fault). Jason Zucker was considered kind of a tweener entering the season — a player that was a star in the AHL but couldn’t keep a spot in the big leagues — and he’s gotten off to a start that would lead even the harshest critics to believe that he’s a bona fide NHL player at this point in his career.

With how much depth the Wild have, a combination of proven veterans and rising stars, Yeo has been able to juggle line combinations in order to allow players that are heating up to increase their production and snap other players out of a funk. On the other end, however, he has lost defenseman Keith Ballard, Jonas Brodin and Marco Scandella for part of the season due to the mumps. “The mumps? When’s the last time you heard somebody get the mumps?” says Matt Dumba, who has received more playing time due to the loss of his teammates. “That’s like the plague. You hear about that in the same way you hear about scurvy.”

And then, of course, Zach Parise suffered a concussion and the team lost a core ingredient right after a hot start and had a slump that brought them back to .500. “We lost some pretty important guys; unfortunately it happens,” said Parise before he got injured. “The guys that are going to be inserted into different spots are going to have to kind of fill those voids, but hopefully those guys will get healthy and we’ll be back sooner than later.”

The problem for Minnesota is that there is little room for error in the Central Division. The Chicago Blackhawks are an elite NHL team, the St. Louis Blues have the talent necessary to succeed in coach Ken Hitchcock’s system and the Colorado Avalanche might have the best young talent in the league with Nathan MacKinnon and Gabriel Landeskog. Even teams like the Nashville Predators, Winnipeg Jets and Dallas Stars are not easy opponents. Nashville is always sound defensively despite their perennial lack of talent; the Jets always have a lot of young talent and are on the verge of turning the corner; and the Stars are no pushover, adding Jason Spezza to a core that includes Tyler Seguin, Jamie Benn and Alex Goligoski, among others. “The things that were there last year, I think got better,” said Yeo before the season started. “And the teams that weren’t there got better. I know how difficult our division is.”

In order for the Wild to vie for home ice, where they have unquestionably played their best hockey, in the playoffs it must shore up a few things: The power play, which went 0-for-October, needs to click at a higher rate and veterans Koivu and Vanek need to play to their potential. If Minnesota is able to do that, this team could make a deep playoff run this season and even bring home the Stanley Cup. If they are not able to check those boxes, however, this team could miss the playoffs altogether.

Home sweet home

I think you look at our record at home and you look at our record on the road and obviously that’s a big factor as to why we’re at the position we’re in now.

— Mike Yeo, 11/14/14

Through 20 games the Wild are 7-1-0 at home and 5-7-0 away from St. Paul. The discrepancy has not been ignored by Yeo. “I think you look at our record at home and you look at our record on the road and obviously that’s a big factor as to why we’re at the position we’re in now,” he said before the team traveled to Texas to play the Dallas Stars on Nov. 15.

They pulled off a win that night, which was only fitting: Minnesota was 1-14-5 at the American Airlines Center since March 2003 before the 4-1 blowout and was 2-6-0 on the road at the time. That’s how this season has gone so far.

There’s multiple factors that come in when it comes to road woes. Travel can take its toll on players, especially when crossing time zones flying thousands of miles cross-country often during times when a player may otherwise be resting. It’s harder to eat well, it’s harder to sleep and it’s harder to maintain a schedule.

On the ice, the team has to deal with last change and a raucous crowd. Minnesota already has played the Rangers, Bruins, Flyers and Canadiens on the road — four difficult venues to play in for any team, but especially one that is young to begin with and had many of their veterans out at the time. Even Los Angeles, which isn’t known for die-hard fans or it’s hockey tradition, packs the Staples Center for Kings games, as they did against the Wild.

Ironically, the Wild are 3-2 in those four contests. They blew a three-goal third period lead in Madison Square Garden; the night after they won in Boston. They were blown out 4-1 at the Bell Centre in Montreal and then won in Dallas and Philadelphia. But despite turning things around on the road in recent contests, toughness still remains a concern for this team.

“I think as a group we have to get tougher,” said Yeo before the team headed to Dallas. “I’m not talking about tougher in the sense of us dropping our gloves, I’m talking about the toughness of playing the same way on the road as you do at home and with the same confidence and the same desperation and the same ability to get over a bad play or the same ability to move on if something has gone well or hasn’t gone well.”

For the most part, the Wild have gotten tough mentally. It’s not easy to break a curse like they did in Dallas, especially what is still an emotionally-charged game for people back home who once rooted for the North Stars. A come from behind victory in Philadelphia is equally impressive: GM Ron Hextall had just called out his team for, well, not being tough enough. This team has dramatically changed from the one that laid an egg on the road against the lowly Senators and Devils just a few weeks prior.

At the same time, the toughness factor must be present throughout the season. In order to gain ground in the Central Division, they’ll have to pick up wins in Chicago, St. Louis and Colorado — three buildings that tend to pack every night — let alone the more intimate, and sometimes more intimidating venues, in Winnipeg and Nashville. And sometimes toughness is going to involve dropping the gloves. While the enforcer has gone the way of the dodo, and rightfully so given what we know about concussions and the the post-playing lives of former enforcers like the late Derek Boogaard, tough players will be around as long as the game is played. The team was roundly criticized for not stepping up after Erik Haula was hit in the head in New York, and the team needs to take care of business by answering physically as well as with skill.

The combination of making the Rangers answer for taking liberties with a skill player as well as punishing them on the power play, would have gone a long way in preventing that come-from-behind victory from happening.

 

Power outage

We know it’s gonna come, we’re not too down about it, and you’ve just got to keep a positive focus and a positive mind, and it’s gonna get going eventually for us, and I think the floodgates will open when it does.

— Charlie Coyle, 10/24/14

Speaking of the power play, a great way to punish a team for taking out one of your best skill players is to pepper them with goals after a 5-minute major penalty. A team like the Wild, which is chock-full of scorers, should be capable of putting the puck in the net. In addition to young stars like Niederreiter, Zucker and Granlund who are all capable of being goal-scorers in the NHL, they have proven veterans like Parise, Pominville and Vanek who have scored 30 goals (or more) on multiple occasions in their careers. Add in players like Coyle and Koivu who have a history of making the players around them better and voila, Minnesota should have one of the most productive power plays in the league.

Instead, however, they are converting those man-advantage opportunities just 9.7 percent of the time, which is the third worst clip in the league. Nobody can seem to find the back of the net.

“[The] challenge for us is what I challenge our players, individually, it’s how I challenge our team collectively…to make sure that we’re focused on the process,” says Yeo, “the little things that are required right now.”

Vanek appeared to break three spells in one move, scoring his first goal on the power play at Dallas — what are the odds? — but managed to only reverse the curse against the former North Stars. He has yet to score a goal since, and only Niederreiter, who also scored in Dallas, has found the puck in the back of net with some consistency during the power play.

While Yeo cannot jump on the ice when the team is a man up and put one past the goaltender — if he could he probably would — he is in charge of line combinations and has yet to unlock this team’s offensive potential. He has tried splitting up the veterans and the young players, an interesting tactic, and it was a rather clever idea. Some of his young players — Niederreiter, Zucker, etc. — are his team’s best goal-scorers, and the youth could stand to learn from the veterans. Keep in mind, it is not as though this team is having trouble entering the zone, the Wild has managed to get zone time and pepper goaltenders with shots.

On the other hand, guys like Coyle and Zucker have been used to try and jump-start Koivu and Vanek in 5-on-5 play, and that should translate to the power play as well.

There is some merit in thinking that as long as this team continues to do what they are doing, the goals will go in — after all, zone time and shots should equal goals over the course of time — but we’re a quarter of the way through the season and this unit is still underachieving. In fact, their penalty kill unit is top five in the NHL at 86.9 percent.

“Fans are so passionate and they want the end result and that’s great, that’s what fuels them to be such great fans all the time,” says Zucker, “that’s why we love them and that’s the great part about them. But I think deep down they do realize that it is a process. As much as they want the quick results, they do realize that it is a process at times and that is something that we realize for sure.”

The talent is there, without a doubt, which only makes it more frustrating for the club and fans alike, even if they know it is a process.

 

Koivu and Vanek need to play to their potential

Do I want to score more? Of course, but you can’t change the way you play. It’s going to bring you success.

— Mikko Koivu, as told to NHL.com’s Dan Rosen, 10/28/14

The Wild have $13.25 million tied up in Koivu and Vanek this year, according to capgeek.com.

Aside from Parise and Suter, who have matching $7.54 million cap hits, Koivu and Vanek are the two highest paid players on the Wild: Koivu’s hit is $6.75 million, Vanek’s is $6.5. That’s a significant chunk of change for one player who’s only had five assists in 20 games this season and another who is on pace for four goals this year.

It’s important to keep in mind that Koivu’s contract was signed before the Wild brought aboard Parise and Suter on the Fourth of July 2012, and while the young talent was appealing to the two superstars, Koivu was a big part of the equation. And in Vanek’s case it’s well-documented that the Islanders were willing to toss upwards of $50 million at him to stay on Long Island, so the 3-year, $19.5 million deal he signed looked like a hometown discount when the former Golden Gopher and longtime Lake Elmo resident in the offseason.

Another caveat with Koivu is that no matter what his price tag is, his value is measured both on the ice and in the locker room.

“Guys like Koivu and Parise and those guys, I think they have that type of relationship where if Koivu comes up to me and says something that I’m not doing right, I’m not going to get upset and say he’s calling me out,” says Zucker. “I understand that he’s trying to make me better because he wants this team to win.”

On a team that arguably could have five captains if the league allowed them to — in addition to Koivu (C), Parise (A) and Suter (A), Pominville has been a captain before and Ballard plays a leadership role among the defensive corps — that’s a meaningful distinction; it’s not as though the team is lacking in that department.

“[It’s] really a lot of leadership and you don’t necessarily need a letter to be a leader in here,” says Coyle, “we have a lot of guys that bring a different element of leadership to the table, which is huge.”

When it comes to Vanek, it’s not as though he has not been productive. He is tied for the team lead in assists with 10, but part of his problem is that he’s almost too generous with the puck.

In what is becoming a team epidemic — they’re too Minnesota nice, I guess — goal-scorers are passing up good angles on the goaltender in attempt to set up teammates who either are well-defended or shooting from a worse position on the ice. This isn’t to say that Vanek shouldn’t try and set up his teammates, he’s probably a better passer than people give him credit for, but a player who does not offer as much defensively or in the neutral zone as many of his teammates, he has to be able to find the back of the net.

If Koivu can start generating scoring chances for his teammates and Vanek instills fear in opposing goaltenders as he once did, many other problems will be taken care of. The power play will likely improve and more goal-scoring should get this team going early in games, especially when they are playing a good team in a hostile environment on the road.

It’s been said before, but it’s worth saying again: This team has enough talent to win the Stanley Cup, especially with the parity in the NHL. But it also is capable of underachieving and missing the playoffs, which is unacceptable given how well guys like Niederreiter and Zucker have been playing to begin the season.

In a sports-crazed city with three other rebuilding teams, our championship hopes lie with this club. We pick nits with the Wild because we have high expectations for them, which is a good thing.