Well hello again, hockey fans! Welcome to Week #1 of Your Name Is Wild!
For those of you who are new to the column, here's the scoop: The NHL season is a long, tedious journey. We decided that this season we would ask TCDroogsma of the blog Wildly Biased to stop by each week and give us an update on our local squad.
Last week was opening week in the NHL. The Wild opened their season Thursday night, so we only have two games to recap.
Droogsy, thoughts?
Opening Week was a short one for the Wild. They started the season by hosting two California teams in St. Paul.
The Week That Was
Thursday 10/3 - Los Angeles: 3 Wild: 2 (SO)
Opening Night at the Xcel Energy Center is pretty much my favorite of all the sports opening nights. Every season the Wild manage to convince us all that this is going to be the year when all the pieces finally come together and, as such, there's always a real sense of electricity in the air. Perhaps that's why, up until Thursday night, the Wild had never lost a home opener.
Thursday night's loss was a tough one. The Wild did a lot of nice things in going toe-to-toe with the Kings, but it was all for naught. The Wild may have landed a few punches, but at the end of the night it was the Kings skating off with two points.
The Wild were able to jump on top early when former-villain-turned-good-guy Matt Cooke scored the first goal of the season in the first period, but that goal turned out to be the opening blow in what was a back and forth affair all night.
Kings defenseman Drew Doughty tied the game at one before the first period was over. Young stud defenseman Jonas Brodin gave the Wild the lead again before the period was out, but that was all the scoring the Wild would get.
The Wild were only 6:30 minutes away from an opening night win, but one bad shift by Charlie Coyle cost the Wild. Coyle lost track of Jeff Carter in the Kings end and then failed to get back as the Kings mounted a rush. Carter put the puck behind Niklas Backstrom and the game headed to overtime.
As usual, the bonus hockey was fun, but that old sense of dread turned up when the game was pushed to a shootout. As has happened so, so many times in the past the Wild were quickly dispatched when Backstrom failed to stop either shot he faced.
Wild Player Of The Game: Matt Cooke - The villain-turned-hero scored the first goal of the Wild's season. I'm convinced he's part of some larger plot to troll Wild fans.
Impression Of The Game: A disappointing way to start the season, but a lot of teams lose to the Kings. The Wild were able to skate, hit, & score with a presumably superior opponent.
Saturday 10/5 - Anaheim: 4 Wild: 3 (OT)
Ugh... two games down and two disappointing results.
Unlike the Kings game, the Wild didn't come out swinging in this one. In fact, they spent most of the game playing catch up after allowing the Ducks to score two goals before the game was even ten minutes old.
Fortunately, the Wild's very expensive first line of Jason Pominville-Mikko Koivu-Zach Parise decided to put the team on their back with Parise scoring twice and Pominville scoring once. Despite the efforts of that first line (and a post-denting shot from Dany Heatley), the Wild weren't able to find the back of the net again.
The Wild headed to overtime for the second time in as many games. With one point in the bank the Wild found themselves playing some fire wagon hockey in the waning minutes of OT. Unfortunately, that up and down play led to Jared Spurgeon blowing a tire on a Ducks rush, allowing Mathieu Perrault to slide the winner underneath Niklas Backstrom's pads.
Wild Player Of The Game: Mathew Dumba - Despite the fact that Zach Parise scored two goals, it's important to commemorate the debut of Mathew "Odd Future" Dumba (pictured above) with the Wild. At 19 years old he's the youngest defenseman ever to play for the team. The future's looking bright.
Impressions Of The Game: A tough loss. This one left a lot of the fanbase having flashbacks to last season's collapse. The slow start, the failure in OT, talking ourselves into the value of one point... we've all seen that film too many times.
Unfortunately, the loss turned out to be costly for the Wild as second-year, second-line center Charlie Coyle sprained his knee. With Coyle expected to be out for 3-4 weeks the Wild suddenly find their second & third lines jumbled. Winger Jason Zucker was recalled to take his place on the roster.
The Week Ahead
Tuesday 10/8: Wild at Nashville
The Wild make their first road trip of the year, a one-off to Nashville to face the Predators. This game should be interesting for a few reasons that are best organized as a list:
01. Thanks to realignment this is the first time the Wild & Predators will be playing each other as division rivals.
02. There's been some peculiar bad blood between the two franchises since the Wild signed former Predators Ryan Suter in the summer of 2012. Preds GM David Poile threw an epic fit when Suter left the squad and the Preds fans picked up on the energy and now boo Suter mercilessly when the Wild are in town.
03. Speaking of former players, this will be the first time the Wild will play against former teammate Matt Cullen. Cullen was a popular player here in the Twin Cities, but chose to cash in on one last big payday with the Predators in the offseason.
04. For reasons that are unclear to anybody, the Wild & Preds have played an abnormally large number of strange, high-scoring games despite both being low-scoring, defense-first teams. I don't know what to tell you.
05. From an aesthetics standpoint, this will be the first regular season in which the Wild wear their new white sweaters. While those sweaters are indisputably sexy, the Preds have debuted yet another new scheme, this time wearing breezers with vertical strips & socks with horizontal stripes. If that sentence doesn't make sense to you trust me, it will the second you see this eyesore.
Thursday 10/10 - Winnipeg at Wild
The tour of the new Central Division continues when the Jet come to town. You'll hear a lot of rhetoric over the course of the week about how these two teams are destined by geography to become rivals. Oddly, you'll likely hear very little about Jets defenseman and overall bastard Zach Bogosian concussing Pierre-Marc Bouchard with a cross-check to the back last time the Wild played in Winnipeg. Nobody's worse at marketing than the NHL.
Saturday 10/12 - Dallas at Wild
The Wild complete the new division hat trick when the Stars, or at least the Stars players wearing comically ugly sweaters, visit St. Paul. This is bound to be an annoying game since, after all the "rivalry-building" marketing of the Jets game I'm sure FSN will pretty much forget that they pretty much tried to force the Stars/Wild rivalry down our throat for more than a decade. Ah well...
The Big Picture
After starting the season by losing in OT twice the fanbase is a little shook. Now, obviously, it's ridiculous to get to worked up about the first two games of an 82 game season (especially when your squad cashed two of four points), but I'm giving some panicked fans the benefit of the doubt.
Traditionally the Wild has been a team that starts hot. They usually play well to start the season, cash points, and then the inevitable toll of injuries and travel leave them scrambling for points as the end of the season. With the Wild starting slowly & acquiring "loser points" the fans (myself included... somewhat...) have snapped back to those late-season moments. It's not healthy.
Regardless, as I wrote on Wildly Biased earlier, if the Wild had beat the Kings and lost to the Ducks (or vice versa), they would have acquired the same two out of four points but the fans would have been far more upbeat. Nobody said hockey fans were rational. And that's part of the fun.
The week ahead should be a fun one. With Chicago & St. Louis the presumptive #1 & #2 in the Central these games against Nashville, Winnipeg, & Dallas are surprisingly important despite the season being so young.
There you have it, hockey fans! Week #1 is in the books!
For more of TCDroogsma's hockey ramblings be sure to give him a follow on Twitter (@WildlyBiased). He can also be found writing about the Wild in greater detail on his hockey blog Wildly Biased.
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