Written by Nicolas Hallett
To be the best, you have to be able to beat the best.
So, thus far this season, how have the Minnesota Wild faired against the NHL’s finest?
Mike Yeo’s team is 14-10-1 on the year and currently on the outside looking in when it comes to the playoff picture as the Western Conference’s 10th-ranked team. Overall, 19 of the Wild’s 25 games have come against teams that featured in the 2013-14 playoffs. Of the Wild’s 11 losses (including one shootout loss), nine of them have come against recent postseason visitors.
To be fair, it has been a murderer’s role of elite teams that Minnesota has had to face thus far.
Amongst its losses, the Wild have had to take on the defending Stanley Cup champions in the Los Angeles Kings (twice), the Western Conference’s top-ranked team last year and so far this year in the Anaheim Ducks (twice), the Stanley Cup runners-up New York Rangers, Eastern Conference finalists Montreal Canadiens, the Steven Stamkos-led Tampa Bay Lightning and the perennial powerhouse that is the Pittsburgh Penguins.
It suffices to say, it hasn’t been easy going for Zach Parise and Co.
Though it’s clear by looking at the results above that the Wild are having trouble handling its more talented peers, that doesn’t paint the whole picture. On the flip side, of the Wild’s 14 wins this season, 10 of them have come against playoff competitors from last year’s campaign.
Throughout the entirety of this season, everyone has been asking the same question about this, the most recent rendition of the Wild: How good are they?
The fact of the matter is that nobody knows. Yeo doesn’t know. He said in the preseason that his team can contend with the best, but at the same time he’s deathly afraid that they might miss the playoffs altogether.
Parise and Ryan Suter don’t know. At times this season they’ve told the media that “losing is no longer acceptable in this locker room.” Yet, speaking with them in the locker room after defeats, they themselves can rarely offer a clear conclusion as to why it happened.
Taking a look at the team’s quality of wins and losses doesn’t seem help answer our question much either. In fact, one could argue it only makes things murkier as the Wild are actually above .500 (10-9) against last season’s upper echelon. Considering the majority of the Wild’s losses have come against the league’s highest tier, one could assert that Minnesota has been hard done by and will slowly begin to escalate upwards. Not to mention some of the unbelievable obstacles the team has faced to this point, with a second-to-last power play unit and the majority of the defensive-corps contracting a disease most famous for its appearance on the Oregon Trail.
Although it’s been ugly at times, maybe the Wild are okay and things are going to get better from here. That said, it’s also feasible to see an avenue where the team flattens out and finishes this season with the unwanted tag of mediocre. For every burgeoning player — Jason Zucker, Nino Niederreiter, Marco Scandella — the Wild seem to have a disappointing one to match — Thomas Vanek, Mikko Koivu, Darcy Kuemper. We can’t say the Wild are bad, yet we can’t necessarily say they are good either. That only leaves us with one label: average.
The power play enigma
Among the Wild’s biggest issues is unquestionably its play with the man advantage.
The numbers say Minnesota's power play is bad. It looks bad on TV. And — surprise, surprise — it looks bad in person, too. Watching from afar, the insecurity amongst the Wild is palpable. The five on the ice look as confident as a teenage boy being dared to ask out the prom queen. The puck moves around but no one wants any part of it. Anaheim — not that they necessarily needed to — did their homework for Friday’s game, a 5-4 win for the visitors, and schemed for the Wild’s biggest shortcoming with the man advantage.
When down a man early in the game, the Ducks sucked in their penalty killers close to the crease and allowed the Wild’s three-man umbrella to pass amongst itself. It was as inefficient — and awkward — as it sounds. Former Wild forward and now assistant coach Andrew Brunette is in charge of the power play unit’s set up, but has yet to find any answers.
Though Brunette does have 55 career power play goals, his role on those units wasn’t a cerebral one. Rather than quarterbacking, Brunette was expected to hold down the front of the net and bang home the rebounds. Orchestrating a power play scheme may not be in his wheelhouse.
Meanwhile, the screams of “Shoot!” continually rain down from the fans. The Wild power play had been booed against Montreal in a win on Wednesday, so it could have been worse.
But a funny thing happened when the Wild listened to their faithful. The NHL’s 29th-ranked unit actually started creating a few chances and finishing them. The Wild scored on their next two power play chances, something that had everyone assuming the apocalypse was near, and pulled themselves back into a game they had trailed 3-0 at one point.
A mixture of goaltending woes and playing one of the best team’s in the league saw the Wild fade in the end. Still, the flash of power play success was something to behold. Sometimes the right answer is the most obvious one.