Rudy Gobert was ejected in the third quarter of Minnesota’s loss to Phoenix on Monday after the center delivered a forearm shove to the back of an airborne Mark Williams as the Suns big man was going up for a shot attempt.

After review, the officials ruled the foul to be a flagrant-penalty two, which results in an immediate expulsion from the game.

Williams received a flagrant foul, penalty-one earlier in the game for hitting Gobert in the face while swiping down hard to attempt to thwart a Gobert finish at the rim.

Gobert’s push marked his second flagrant foul in two games after he was also cited for a flagrant-penalty one via an overzealous closeout on a James Harden triple Saturday against the Clippers.

Gobert has now been whistled for four flagrant fouls this season — Monday’s penalty-two along with three penalty-one infractions. That puts him at five flagrant foul “points” just one-third of the way through the season.

The next flagrant foul he accrues will result in a suspension. If Gobert’s next two flagrant fouls are penalty-one infractions, he’ll be suspended one game for each. After that, every flagrant foul would result in two-game suspensions between now and the end of the regular season.

It seems highly unlikely the Frenchman will go the rest of the year being assessed another flagrant foul given how physical he is while protecting the paint.

Just last year, Wolves guard Anthony Edwards was suspended for a game in Utah after exceeding the NBA’s technical foul limit for a season.  Now Gobert is in high danger of missing games for disciplinary reasons.

Minnesota needs all the wins it can get while trying to position itself amid a crammed top half of the Western Conference race. That means it needs its best defensive player on the floor.

“You can’t make up for Rudy’s absence,” Edwards said after Monday’s loss. “When he’s in the game, they don’t want to go down there and finish. Of course, he’s truly missed when he’s not on the court.”

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On a night that might ultimately prove costly, the Minnesota Wild got a third period goal from Marcus Johansson and survived a slugfest in Seattle, fighting through injuries and inconsistency for a hard-fought 4-1 win over the Kraken on Monday.

Johansson had a picture-perfect redirection of a Joel Eriksson Ek shot to break a 1-1 tie, and Wild goalie Filip Gustavsson had 23 saves as Minnesota snapped a two-game losing streak and ended its lengthy western road trip on an optimistic note.

But the two points came at a price for the Wild, who lost forward Mats Zuccarello, defenseman Jake Middleton, forward Matt Boldy and forward Nico Sturm at various times throughout the game.

“Obviously it was a physical, highly-contested game, by both teams,” Wild coach John Hynes said. “I liked liked our response. I thought we played hard and we played smart, and I think that’s what you want to do in those situations.”

Eriksson Ek had a second period goal for the Wild, who likely employed plenty of ice packs on their late-night charter back to the Twin Cities. Kirill Kaprizov and Vladimir Tarasenko added late empty net goals.

“It wasn’t easy tonight, a few guys short. We dug in there and I think we showed a lot of character and grit today,” said Johansson who was red hot in November, then snapped a five-game drought without a point by scoring on Monday. “It was a fun game and a big two points for us.”

Facing the NHL’s worst penalty killers, statistically, the Wild had early opportunities, first when Boldy was tripped barely a minute into the game, and again when Kaprizov took an inadvertent high stick to the cheek. They gave Seattle goalie Philipp Grubauer plenty of first period work, including a Ryan Hartman breakaway, but he was up to the puck-stopping task.

Then things went downhill, quickly, for the Wild with five minutes left in the first. Zuccarello, skating through the neutral zone with the puck, was taken out by a high, hard check from Seattle defenseman Vince Dunn. Initially called a major penalty on Dunn, referees looked at the video and downgraded it to a clean hit, and Seattle ended up with a power play.

The bigger loss was Zuccarello, the team’s top-line wing, who headed down the tunnel to the locker room and did not return. With Zuccarello unavailable, the Wild went with an all-Russian top line much of the rest of the game – rookie Danila Yurov centering Kaprizov and Tarasenko.

“He’s doing OK,” Hynes said when asked for an update on Zuccarello after the game. “I saw him back there now, but I don’t know what the timeline would be.”

The coach said there would be updates on Zuccarello, Boldy, Middleton and Sturm — who returned and played the game’s final two minutes — once the team is back in Minnesota and the players can be more fully evaluated.

Minnesota finally broke the scoreless deadlock early in the middle frame when Eriksson Ek slipped a low shot between Grubauer’s knees after a pass from Boldy, who was behind the net.

But the lead, and the momentum, went away relatively quickly. Seattle scored on a power play before the game’s midway point, and Grubauer was again on his game, stopping a Yakov Trenin shorthanded breakaway later in the second.

Just nine seconds after Johansson’s go-ahead goal, Seattle briefly thought it had re-tied the game, when Tye Kartye swatted a puck out of the air, off Gustavsson’s back and into the net. Officials almost immediately ruled no goal, and replays confirmed that Kartye had played the puck with a high stick.

Trenin, who has led the NHL in hits for much of the season, continued his high-contact game on Monday, recording a season-high nine hits in the win.

Grubauer finished with 25 saves for Seattle, which has now lost five in a row. The Kraken host Minnesota again in a month, with the Wild closing out a seven-game road trek on Jan. 8 in Seattle.

The Wild will play their next four at home, starting Thursday when the Dallas Stars make their first visit of the season to Grand Casino Arena.

Briefly

The Wild went with 11 forwards and seven defensemen on Monday, scratching fourth-line forward Tyler Pitlick and adding reserve defenseman Daemon Hunt to the lineup. Hunt had been a healthy scratch for the previous eight games. Pitlick has played in 18 games for Minnesota this season, and is still looking for his first point with his home state NHL team. The alignment made things tougher when Zuccarello left the game, leaving Minnesota with just 10 forwards for the final two periods.

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Minnesota got off to another slow start, which has been a constant in its previous five victories. But the Timberwolves had always been able to dig themselves out of holes with strong second-half performances.

Yet the Wolves flew too close to the Suns on Monday, as Phoenix held on for a 108-105 victory at Target Center to snap Minnesota’s winning streak.

Minnesota trailed by three with the ball and six seconds to play, but Jaden McDaniels’ potential game-tying attempt clanked off the iron.

Anthony Edwards was questionable entering the evening with an illness, but he played and delivered one of his most efficient offensive performances of the season. He finished with 40 points on 15 for 21 shooting to go with nine boards.

But the rest of Minnesota’s offense struggled. All Wolves not named Edwards and Julius Randle combined to shoot 33% from the floor.

“We’ve got to shoot the ball better,” Wolves coach Chris Finch said. “I thought a lot of them were decent looks.”

Jaden McDaniels, Donte DiVincenzo and Naz Reid were a combined 4 for 26 from the field.

Rudy Gobert was having a nice night, dominating Phoenix’s smaller frontcourt. He had 15 points and eight rebounds in 21 minutes before he was ejected in the third quarter for a flagrant-2 foul after shoving an airborne Mark Williams in the back on his dunk attempt.

Gobert is now one flagrant foul away from a one-game suspension.

Bones Hyland gave Minnesota a nice offensive spark. He played in favor of Rob Dillingham and produced for 14 points and three assists in 16 minutes.

“We were 24 games in and I thought it was time to try something different,” Finch said. “He’s been patient, doing really well in practice, doing everything we asked him to do.”

All five of Phoenix’s starters scored in double figures, led by Williams, who tallied 22 points and seven rebounds. The Wolves are now 0-2 this season against Phoenix.

ORLANDO — The Twins are planning on hanging onto their stars at this time. Now, the question for the remainder of the offseason is how they can best build around them and bring the team back to a competitive level.

This, Twins president of baseball and business operations Derek Falvey had maintained all along, was his hope, though he admitted he didn’t always know if it was path the team would take.

Given the team’s financial situation and on the heels of last July’s sell off, rumors had swirled about starting pitchers Joe Ryan and Pablo López. Even Byron Buxton, who holds a no-trade clause, had been the subject of speculation, with a report suggesting he might waive it if the team was headed into a rebuild.  López and Buxton are the team’s highest-paid players and if rebuilding was the path the Twins opted for, they would be logical trade candidates.

Ultimately, they chose otherwise.

“I was hopeful … that we’d get to this place, but I always knew there could be different paths that we could choose,” Falvey said Monday at MLB’s Winter Meetings. “I think, at this stage, figuring a way to add to this group was clearly the best fit for all what we aligned around.”

New Twins manager Derek Shelton said his assumption when he took the job in late October was that the trio would be part of the team. But still, he thought it was important that they heard it from him and wanted to reinforce that in his conversations with them this offseason.

With that settled, the question turns to how the Twins are going to improve the team around them and what areas they need to upgrade after stripping down the roster at the trade deadline and shipping away 10 major leaguers.

Five of the traded players were relievers, and adding to the bullpen is the team’s most obvious need at this point. The rebuilt bullpen will likely be a mix of players already on the roster, starters converted to relievers and external additions. On the position player side, general manager Jeremy Zoll referenced their desire to add “another bat or two with some thump, with some impact.” First base seems like a natural place to add.

Their ability to add to the roster, of course, comes back to payroll and the Twins have made no indication publicly about the payroll flexibility they might have, though they’re certainly not expected to be big spenders. The addition of two limited partners joining the Pohlad family in ownership was announced in August, and there’s still a question of how those two groups might affect the team’s payroll.

Falvey did indicate that there should be news on the limited partners in “the near term.” He also mentioned presenting options for the direction of the team to a larger ownership group with a “few more people that we get to talk to about it.”

“Jeremy and I had a number of conversations internally with our group and then ultimately with ownership to discuss what that could look like going forward and we’ll continue to work closely with them through the offseason in terms of navigating what  comes next,” Falvey said. “But my job, our collective job, is to figure out ways that we can add some pieces to the group that we have now.”

The Twins finished last season in fourth place, leading to the firing of Rocco Baldelli and the dismissal of some of his coaching staff. But some of the players they got in return — like Taj Bradley and Mick Abel and Alan Roden — are major-league ready and Falvey said it was always on his mind that the Twins would “find a way to retool,” the group on the fly and add to a group that they thought could compete.

“It’s going to take some creative work in trying to figure out how to plug some holes,” Falvey said. “Ultimately we’re going to need some guys to step up, but that’s probably always going to be our situation to some degree.”

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