Minnesota Wild: Need To Make The Powerplay Work

The Minnesota Wild’s opening night loss away to the Colorado Avalanche highlighted a lot of weaknesses with the current make-up of the team, not least that of the power-play.

When Jared Spurgeon is logging the highest power-play minutes on a Minnesota Wild team that also includes Matt Dumba and Ryan Suter as blue-line options, you can tell something is up. Undervalued as he is, Spurgeon isn’t quite the point-scorer the other two are.

Likewise, spending more than 5 minutes on the power-play should result in more than a measly 7 shots on net, only 5 of which could really be viewed as high danger shot attempts.

Possession-wise, the team holds it very well during a power-play, as evidenced against the Avalanche, but it’s all well and good to move the puck around between yourselves; at some point, you need to take shots and see if you can squeak one in!

I’d like to see Jordan Greenway given a chance on the man-advantage. He’s the exact kind of big body that can upset another team’s goaltender.

If he was given some power-play time, I’d have expected him to have at least gotten under Semyon Varlamov‘s skin, if not contributed something more than that.

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The play of the Minnesota Wild all round has been called out as slow and almost lackadaisical. Slow isn’t a bad thing provided it’s slow and methodical. What we saw, even on the man advantage, was slow and lacking any sort of aggression.

Obviously, it’s only game one of the season; there’s plenty of room to improve. It wasn’t a home game either, which may or may not have influenced the players.

Let’s give it a few more games before passing a truer judgement, but based on the single game so far, the power-play is in need of tweaking at the very least. It didn’t click in the way it needs to; power-plays represent a chance at easy goal-scoring. You have to make it count.

Hopefully, Bruce Boudreau doesn’t prove too stubborn in maintaining his current units and is willing to shake things up if need be.

Even pushing a fourth-line depth guy onto the power-play may be an option; they’re going to work hard to maintain their spot there – maybe that’s the trick to introduce a bit of fight?

Statistics courtesy of Natural Stat Trick.