NEW YORK – One of the familiar “hockeyisms” that Don Lucia liked to use during his time as head coach of the Minnesota Gophers holds true even today.
“The first team to three is usually going to win,” he would say, stressing the importance of his teams putting three or more goals on the board.
The offensive challenges for the Minnesota Wild, as they push for the playoffs while still missing two of their more dynamic goal-scorers – Kirill Kaprizov and Joel Eriksson Ek – can be underscored with some simple math, showing how difficult it has been for the Wild to get to three goals on any given night.
Since resuming play after the 4 Nations break on Feb. 22 in Detroit with a 4-3 overtime win, the Wild have gone 8-9-2, and have scored 41 goals. That is an average of 2.1 goals per game. Take away the 11 power play goals scored by the Wild in that stretch, and they are averaging 1.5 even-strength goals per game.
Some nights that is enough, especially with the team generally playing stellar defense, buoyed by the return of Jonas Brodin, and getting solid goaltending from Filip Gustavsson.
Monday’s 3-2 shootout loss in New Jersey, even though it resulted in an important standings point, illustrated the offensive frustrations that have gripped the Wild of late. After the Devils scored a first period goal, the Wild needed to push and push and push to exhaustion to tie the game. The Devils took another lead, and Minnesota needed to take advantage of a defensive breakdown to get to overtime via Matt Boldy’s goal with 2:05 left in regulation.
Marcus Foligno, who set up the tying goal, joked that by this point in a season — with just seven games to go before the playoff field is set — the team is “pretty numb” to any potential offensive frustration after trailing 1-0 for much of the game in New Jersey.
“As long as we keep that a goal away, I think we’re fine. That’s the mentality we have. I mean, no one’s counting,” he said. “Really, it’s a lot of positivity. We think that if we can get one we can get another one after. This is how we have to play. We’ve gotta play stingy. We’ve gotta play smart and for most of the game … we had some really good, relentless pressure.”
On a team where injuries have been a non-stop part of the storyline, seemingly, since training camp, the healthy players are long past the point of worrying about who is not in the lineup or when they might return. And Boldy made it clear that nobody is looking for sympathy when pucks aren’t going in the net.
“I mean, what are you gonna do? Yeah, you’re down a goal, you’re not gonna sit there and pout, that’s the nature of life. Stuff goes wrong, you step up and you work harder, you put your head down and find ways to create a positive, score a goal, whatever it is,” said Boldy, whose 25th goal of the season — a pretty backhand move — tied the game late. “We’re not a group that pouts in here and that sits and gets all sad and stuff when things aren’t going our way. We put our heads down and go to work.”
And if that “head down, keep working” attitude gets them to three goals, most of the time the mission is accomplished.
April Fools from Da Beauty League
In 1993, Minnesota lost its NHL team to the Sunbelt, and needed to wait seven years to get a new franchise. For a time on Tuesday, it looked like the State of Hockey was losing an entire league to another warm-weather destination.
Da Beauty League, which has featured some of the best local NHL and college players scrimmaging a few nights a week in the summer has been a popular hockey fix for fans for the past decade or so, with games held at Braemar Arena in Edina. For hockey-starved fans in the off-season, the crowds are usually big, and it’s a place where autograph seekers can often get a hockey card or hat signed.
So there was naturally some shock and disappointment on Tuesday morning when the league’s official Instagram account included an announcement that Da Beauty League would be seeking to fill the void left in metro Phoenix when the NHL’s Coyotes moved to Utah, and that the league’s games would be played in Tempe, Arizona, next summer.
Alas, in the fourth paragraph of the solemn announcement, DBL officials confirmed that the relocation plans were just a harmless April Fool’s joke, and the 2025 edition of the league faces off on July 9 in Edina.
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