The Minnesota Wild have made five consecutive trips to the playoffs and are closing in on a sixth, but their fans are used to a swoon.
Under former coach Mike Yeo and current coach Bruce Boudreau, the Wild seem to always hit the skids at some point in the second half.
It happened to Boudreau’s first Wild team about a year ago at this time, when they already had a playoff spot all but locked up. And with a brutal “three games in four days” stretch starting with the league’s top team — the Nashville Predators — at Xcel Energy Center on Saturday, there’s a feeling that if the Wild are going to swoon, this would be a bad time to do it.
But the players aren’t concerned, and with the playoffs coming up quickly, the games are starting to feel more intense.
“The pace and the intensity of our last few games, you can really tell it’s starting to build to that time of year,” Wild left winger Zach Parise after Friday’s skate at the team’s new practice rink.
“Not as if we took our foot off the gas last year, but we knew we were in (the playoffs) where now we have to make sure that we’re sharp and getting our game in the right spot, so I think it will be some great challenges, but it will be really good for us to prepare like that.”
After the Preds visit Saturday, the Wild host the Eastern Conference power Boston Bruins on Sunday and travel to Nashville on Tuesday. But the whirlwind of games comes after a four-day break, which Boudreau says got old quickly.
“I think you could tell they’re tired of practicing,” he said after Friday’s skate. “They’re tired of sitting on the sidelines and we want to be involved in this thing.
So it’s good that we’re playing (Saturday). I hope we got some rest, I hope we got some enthusiasm and I hope we got some good practice time in. Those are the three things we wanted to do.”
Things were maybe going a little too smoothly for the Predators last week. They’d won four in a row, grabbed at least a point in 15 straight games, had become the league’s first confirmed playoff entrant and are closing in on the first President’s Trophy in franchise history. But the good feelings came to a crashing halt in their 5-2 home loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs, and their coach felt the cause was simple.
“One team was fast, the other team wasn’t fast,” Peter Laviolette said before the team headed to Minnesota. “To me, that’s where you get lopsided. The ice seems to tilt one way. … We were off the mark with regard to that and we’ll look to fix it and be better.”
Before the loss, it could hardly seem that the Preds could do things better, but at least one player looked at the loss as a wake-up call.
“I think you look at this stretch we’ve had with 15 games with points, and we’ve been squeaking out wins and finding ways to win, but that’s not playoff hockey,” Nashville defenseman Ryan Ellis said. “We’ve gotten away with that for some time, but it finally caught up with us playing a really good team.”
The Wild are 2-1-0 against Nashville this season, with the home team winning each game.
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