NEW YORK — All season the Minnesota Wild’s penalty killers have been a topic of conversation, and until recently, for all the wrong reasons. For much of the winter, the surest way to see a Wild opponent score was to wait until a player in green and red went to the penalty box.

After that, it generally wouldn’t take long.

While the NHL’s league-wide statistics still show the Wild owning the worst penalty kill in the Western Conference, the unit has been notably effective recently. On Wednesday in Manhattan, with the game tied 4-4 in the third period, the Wild killed off a trio of Rangers power plays and earned the point that comes with overtime.

In the past dozen games, the Wild have killed 24 of the opponents’ 28 man advantage situations after going 4 for 4 versus the Rangers (83.3 percent).

Marco Rossi, who scored the tying goal for Minnesota early in the third period of a back-and-forth game, was already looking beyond the regular season when talking about the penalty kill and what it means.

“That was huge,” he said. “I know at that time of year, even in the playoffs, the special teams have to be really good if you want to win. So, they did a really good job.”

Part of the difference has been a simple solution that coach John Hynes stressed when the penalty kill was struggling. You don’t need to kill penalties if you don’t take penalties. And in eight of the last 12 games, the Wild have been whistled two times or fewer.

As the penalties started piling up at Madison Square Garden, Hynes said the key for his team was keeping their cool and getting the job done.

“You do feel those emotions, but I think it’s important that you’ve got to stay on task,” Hynes said following the Rangers’ 5-4 overtime win. “It’s about if you can stay focused and have the team stay focused. We had to kill the penalties, right? We couldn’t do anything about the situation we were in, and why we were in them. It was more making sure we were focused on what we needed to do to get out of it.”

On Wednesday, the Wild penalty killers also took advantage of a Rangers turnover to score Minnesota’s first shorthanded goal of the season, and they nearly had a second one when Matt Boldy was thwarted on a shorthanded breakaway.

For the Wild, figuring out the best path to penalty kill success, with the playoffs looming, may be some perfect timing.

Zeev Buium a Hobey finalist

The first goal in Minnesota Wild regular season history was scored by Marian Gaborik on October 6, 2000. But the first goal ever scored by a Wild player in a preseason game came a few days earlier off the stick of Scott Pellerin, who in 1992 won the Hobey Baker Award given annually to college hockey’s top player while skating for Maine.

Brian Bonin, who played a handful of games for the Wild in his career, also won the Hobey as a senior for the Gophers in 1996. Now, the Wild have at least a 33 percent chance of grabbing another Hobey winner as Denver defenseman Zeev Buium was announced on Thursday as one of the three Hobey Hat Trick finalists.

As a sophomore for the defending national champions, Buium — the Wild’s first round pick in the 2024 NHL Draft — was named the top player in his conference and the most outstanding player at last weekend Manchester Regional as the Pioneers earned a return trip to the Frozen Four.

That’s where Buium will be on Friday, April 11, when the 2025 Hobey Baker winner is named. Boston College forward Ryan Leonard and Michigan State forward Isaac Howard, who is from Hudson, Wis., are the other two finalists. Leonard signed a contract with the NHL’s Washington Capitals a short time after BC’s season ended.

Among the hockey history on display at Xcel Energy Center is a showcase of past Hobey winners, and the jersey from the most recent recipient: Boston University forward Macklin Celebrini, now a frontrunner for the Calder Trophy skating for the NHL’s San Jose Sharks.

Related Articles

Not pointless, as Wild fall in OT to Rangers

Busy schedule suits the Wild just fine at this time of the season

No pouting allowed, as getting to three goals is elusive for Wild lately

Matt Boldy’s late goal salvages a point for Wild in New Jersey

Newark is where it all began for Wild coach John Hynes

By AMANDA SEITZ

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former heart surgeon and TV pitchman Dr. Mehmet Oz was confirmed Thursday to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Related Articles

Pentagon watchdog to review Hegseth’s use of Signal app to convey plans for Houthi strike

Trump’s tariffs aren’t strictly reciprocal. Here’s how he calculated them

These are the places affected by Trump’s tariffs

Trump’s tariff push is a race against time, and potential voter backlash

Trump’s changes to the federal government aren’t yet a clear political winner or loser: AP-NORC poll

Oz became the agency’s administrator in a party line 53-45 vote.

The 64-year-old will manage health insurance programs for roughly half the country, with oversight of Medicare, Medicaid or Affordable Care Act coverage. He steps into the new role as Congress is debating cuts to the Medicaid program, which provides coverage to millions of poor and disabled Americans.

Oz has not said yet whether he would oppose such cuts to the government-funded program, instead offering a vision of promoting healthier lifestyles, integrating artificial intelligence and telehealth into the system, and rethinking rural health care delivery.

During a hearing last month, he told senators that he did favor work requirements for Medicaid recipients, but paperwork shouldn’t be used to reaffirm that they are working or to block people from staying enrolled.

Oz, who worked for years a respected heart surgeon at Columbia University, also noted that doctors dislike Medicaid for its relatively low payments and some don’t want to take those patients.

He said that when Medicaid eligibility was expanded without improving resources for doctors, that made care options even thinner for the program’s core patients, which include children, pregnant women and people with disabilities.

“We have to make some important decisions to improve the quality of care,” he said.

Oz has formed a close relationship with his new boss, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He’s hosted the health secretary and his inner circle regularly at his home in Florida. He’s leaned into Kennedy’s campaign to “Make America Healthy Again,” an effort to redesign the nation’s food supply, reject vaccine mandates and cast doubt on some long-established scientific research.

The former TV show host talks often about the importance of a healthy diet, aligning closely with Kennedy’s views.

While has has faced some criticism for promoting unproven vitamin supplements and holistic treatments — staples of the “MAHA movement” — he’s regularly encouraged Americans to get vaccinated.

Oz will take over CMS days after the agency was spared from the type of deep cuts that Kennedy ordered at other public health agencies. Thousands of staffers at the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as the National Institutes for Health are out of a job after mass layoffs that started Tuesday.

CMS is expected to lose about 300 staffers, including those who worked on minority health and to shrink the cost of health care delivery.

Some of the fiercest blowback in recent years against “diversity, equity and inclusion” greeted Stanford University in 2022 when it launched the website of its Elimination of Harmful Language initiative. Back then, it was the right that was appalled by the efforts to limit language.

Developed by campus experts in technology and inclusion, the site labeled hundreds of words and phrases “harmful,” urging the use of alternatives. While the list included some terms widely considered offensive (such as “cripple” for disabled or “shemale” for transgender) it also cited a baffling array of anodyne terms — “immigrant,” “grandfather,” “Hispanic” and scores of others. The word “American” was cast out in favor of “U.S. citizen,” lest the former be construed to overlook the existence of the rest of the Americas. “Tribe” was rejected as “equating indigenous people with savages.” While the list was not official university policy, the message was clear: To be an upstanding Stanford citizen, these lines ought not be crossed.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board excoriated the list as self-parody, saying “you used to have to get a graduate degree in the humanities to write something that stupid.” Conservative websites and podcasters had a field day, calling the site “Orwellian.” Stanford Professor Jay Bhattacharya, now President Donald Trump’s head of the National Institutes of Health, called the list “ham handed” and “crazy.” Amid the uproar, Stanford sheepishly pulled down the website, citing the university’s commitment to academic freedom.

Now the left is making a lot of the same critiques, noting that this time the dystopian directive comes from the top of the federal government. As part of its crusade to wrest America from the clutches of “wokeness,” the Trump administration is discouraging federal agencies, grantees and contractors from using a long list of ordinary words like “accessible,” “female,” “women,” “political” and “pollution.” These words have been scrubbed from government policy statements and websites; government affiliates are effectively on notice that their use could result in discipline or punishment.

Some of the words on the Stanford and Trump lists overlap, including variations of “Hispanic,” “victim,” “pronouns” and “transexual,” a vivid illustration of where the extremes of right and left tilt so far as to appear to converge. After ridiculing Stanford’s censorious overreach, a right-wing movement supposedly bent on freeing Americans from intrusive controls on speech is indulging in precisely the methods it excoriated.

Trump has made the war on woke a centerpiece of his early weeks in office. He has banned diversity, equity and inclusion policies, eliminated transgender protections, and targeted universities, law firms and government bodies accused of resisting such efforts. The MAGA movement’s disdain for DEI is grounded partly in concerns over sidelining of merit in favor of diversity, and on what it sees as the unfairness of using race or gender to advantage some at the expense of others.

But a second major critique of DEI focuses on the heavy-handed policing of ideas. While the Stanford list was particularly egregious, it is not the only such policy to exert pressure on open discourse. Some see the very adoption of institutional commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion as the imposition of a singular ideology in settings like the university that should be open to all perspectives, including critics of such policies. Arguments over the legitimacy of affirmative action, transgender participation in sports or immigration policy can be stifled when people fear being accused of racism or bigotry for voicing dissenting views.

Overreaching diversity strategies can not only suppress speech, but also compel it. When some universities began to require faculty job applicants to submit personal statements outlining how they support diversity, equity and inclusion, the policies were rightly criticized as signaling to candidates that there was only one right answer when it came to DEI: full-throated embrace.

That the ridiculed Stanford list of harmful words has now been met by an opposing list of disfavored terms reflects the MAGA movement’s conviction that the fire in the belly of diversity advocates can only be fought with more fire. Opponents are convinced that the dangerous entrenchment of DEI in educational institutions, media companies and workplaces must be stopped by any means necessary. To match the implicit censoriousness of the Stanford list and similar approaches never enshrined into law, the Trump administration is resorting to out-and-out censorship.

While the Stanford list, by offering alternate formulations with similar meanings, aimed to declare off-limits specific words rather than entire concepts or ideas, the Trump list does the opposite. Its entries are proxies for whole areas of scholarship, research and policymaking that are now verboten. By instilling fear in government officials, educators and scientists, the Trump administration not only chills speech but also impairs essential work in areas including gender and racial differences in medicine, violence against women and mental health.

At a time when Vice President JD Vance is lecturing Europe about its supposed betrayal of free speech values, the Trump administration has made clear its unwillingness to live by the openness it expects from, say, the German political system. If free speech is a casualty of MAGA’s war to protect free speech, so be it, apparently.

Stanford’s list and other taboos did not succeed in stamping out bias. After strides toward diversity and inclusion on campuses and at corporations, now comes a ferocious counterattack. The retort is fueled in part by the belief that a past commitment to diversity threatened free speech. Now some are rushing to voice opinions that they felt were once muzzled.

Back in 2022, when Stanford professor Bhattacharya was interviewed on Fox News about the university’s harmful language list, he brought up one of the oft-cited risks of declaring words and ideas forbidden, saying: “I see a list of words like that and I want to say those words. I can’t be the only one.”

He is certainly not the only one. And nor is Stanford’s list the only one sure to provoke that reaction. The current chilling of discussions of racial and gender equality may ultimately only make support for such causes hotter.

Suzanne Nossel is a member of Facebook’s Oversight Board and the author of “Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All.” She wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.