Wild Battle Blue Jackets Tonight, Look For Consecutive Wins
Dec 29, 2014; Winnipeg, Manitoba, CAN; The Minnesota Wild players celebrate after the game against the Winnipeg Jets after the third period at MTS Centre The Wild won 3-2. Mandatory Credit: Bruce Fedyck-USA TODAY Sports
The Minnesota Wild finally picked up a win on Monday night, defeating the Jets in Winnipeg 3-2. What was also important was the fact that the Wild won in regulation, denying the Jets a Bettman Point.
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Quick tangent: I am a big college hockey fan, where most conferences have adopted shootouts, like the NHL. However, unlike the NHL, there are 3 points available each game. A regulation or overtime win gets you 3 points, a shootout win 2 points and a loss in the shootout a single point. What is weird about the NHL rule is a win is always worth two points. Therefore, if a game goes to overtime, that game carries three total points compared to the two for a regulation finish, rendering games strangely unequal. I doubt they ever would, but a switch to the college system would fix this odd discrepancy. Anyway, back to the Wild.
Minnesota is attempting to win back-to-back games for the first time since beating the Jets and Flyers on November 16 and 20. That is unspeakably bad, and hopefully gets rectified tonight. Darcy Kuemper will presumably be back in the nets, although the last time I said that, John Curry got a surprise start when Kuemper came down with an illness. The good news is that after playing terribly of late, Kuemper really stood on his head in the third period on Monday. The Wild do not need outstanding goaltending necessarily, but they definitely will need to have more solid performances between the pipes like the one Kuemper gave them on Monday night.
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Currently, the Wild find themselves with 38 points per 34 games. In the rough and tumble Western Conference and Central Division, they need to do better than slightly more than a point per game if they want to make the postseason. Mikael Granlund will be out for roughly a month with his broken wrist, as has been the case all year long, other guys will have to pick up their games in his absence. Despite not having the services of Granlund or Jonas Brodin, who is day-to-day with the always mysterious “upper body injury”, the Wild played really well on Monday. For a team who has struggled to string together solid performances consistently all season, a win tonight on the road in Ohio would go a long ways towards righting the ship.
Puck drop is at 6:00 tonight on Fox Sports North.