Despite who is missing from the lineup, the Wild are not going to make that an excuse for losing.
ST. PAUL - The Minnesota Wild (26-12-4) entered Thursday night's game against the Colorado Avalanche (26-16-1) with a rash of injuries to key players.
They were without Jared Spurgeon, Brock Faber, Jonas Brodin, Kirill Kaprizov, and Jakub Lauko. The Avalanche came into Minnesota after losing to the Chicago Blackhawks the night before, and walked away with a 6-1 win.
"Yeah, they’re banged up over there," Avalanche defenseman Josh Manson said on the Wild. "That’s not their full team but it’s nice to come into a back-to-back and find that energy, find that burst, especially in the third period, right where you feel like you might be slowing down."
I understand you have to trust the 19 guys that play in the game even with all the injuries but you have to wonder what the score would have been if one of the Wild's three best defensemen played tonight.
"Yeah, I mean, you're losing key players like those guys, it's tough to go up against one of the best players in the world, if not a couple of them," Wild assistant captain Marcus Foligno said. "We can't make excuses. We gotta play without these guys for a little bit longer. So, next man up has to be the mentality."
What would the score have been if all five of the guys that were out were in the lineup?
"Yeah, that's not an excuse we can make," Jake Middleton said. "We've shown we can play with guys out of the lineup, right? So as much as you might want to think that or say that, that's not the scenario for our team, especially just because we haven't done it for the first half of the year where guys are stepping up and producing anytime we’ve been down a man."
Middleton, 29, played his second game since missing the previous 11 games with an upper-body injury. Brodin and Faber both got hurt in Middleton's first game back and in his second game back, he was a minus-4 and was on the ice for five of the six goals allowed.
"Yeah, I don’t know. I was personally dogshit, so I’ve got to take a lot of the blame for that. I think I was on for five of the six goals," Middleton said. "Unacceptable at this point of the year to have a performance like that on a personal level, but here we are."
The boxscore may have been deceiving a bit. But looking at a 6-1 loss without five key players, it is easy to ask what it would have been if one or more of them were playing.
“The score looks bad," Wild head coach John Hynes said. "But as I said to you before, the players that were in the lineup tonight competed hard. We were not under siege. We made mistakes that wound up going in the back of the net. They didn’t generate a lot of offense. We didn’t generate a lot of offense. They scored, and we didn’t.
"So regardless of who we have in the lineup, I got a lot of time for the way we played, the preparation the players put in, the commitment level in the game. I know the score is not indicative of it, but a lot of times you have to look through it. There’s going to be times here where we may win a game 6-1 and it might not be where you totally dominated a team and play it. Tonight they found a way to win the game."
According to MoneyPuck, the Wild were the better team in terms of expected goals. They had 3.19 xG compared to the Avalanche's 1.90 xG.
As for the goaltending?
Filip Gustavsson stopped -4.10 goals save above expected on 1.902 xGoals Against. Mackenzie Blackwood stopped 2.19 goals save above expected on 3.19 xGoals Against.
"Well we had a tough start, and then just nothing worked. Pucks went through," Gustavsson said. "Only thing that was good today was probably the PK. They did a great job in front of me on the PK. The rest was very bad."
Gustavsson followed up his 21-save shutout against the Carolina Hurricanes last week with ten goals allowed on 45 shots for a total of 84:33 minutes. He was pulled after he gave up four goals on 18 shots to the St. Louis Blues on Tuesday night.
In his last two games, Gustavsson is 0-1-0 with a .778 save percentage and 7.11 goals-against average.
"Well, two bad games in a row now," Gustavsson said on his confidence level. "Just have to play better next game."
So, despite all the injuries, the Wild still believe they have the right group of guys who can compete and win hockey games whoever is in the lineup on the given night. Lucky for them, they got to go on the road now. The Wild are 11-9-1 at home but are 15-3-3 on the road.
"That's why this game’s so great. You got to be able to do it and character wins," Foligno said on all the injuries. "And … the underdog story, I think that's what we're going to have to live with for a while now. So, yeah, just stay positive. We got to go into San Jose and be hungry, and then go into Vegas with the measuring stick game. If we can get one of those guys that are off right now back, that's huge. But it's got to be the mentality just to stay with it and to play for each other."
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