Minnesota Wild: Six points from five road games not a bad haul
By Luke Ryan
The Minnesota Wild have continued to bring home the points in their latest five-game stint. Ignoring the game against the Anaheim Ducks (game 16), they’ve managed to claim six points from a possible ten.
Heading into the latest five-game stretch, the Minnesota Wild were on Conference-winning pace, netting all ten points on the previous five.
Obviously that pace was never going to be sustainable, especially as they embarked on the West Coast swing of a lengthy road-trip. Historically, the road-trip through California always meant that your team was going to get beat up on and fight real hard to even come away with the odd point.
Instead, the Minnesota Wild came away with full points against the Los Angeles Kings and very nearly snuck a result against Erik Karlsson, Brent Burns and the San Jose Sharks.
The biggest challenge the Wild faced wasn’t the one you’d have picked at the start of the season – the Vancouver Canucks. The franchise has been undergoing a rapid rebuild of late, what with the retirement of Daniel Sedin and brother, Henrik Sedin. Nowadays, it’s all about Elias Pettersson, Brock Boeser and company!
In Vancouver, the Canucks proceeded to bring the, at the time, streaking Minnesota Wild crashing back to Earth, downing them 5-2. It hardly lasted though, the power-play making a strong showing against an Edmonton Oilers outfit that gave up far too many penalties in its’ own building.
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That was followed be a brutal 5-1 beat-down of Central Division rivals, the St. Louis Blues before the aforementioned California trip.
Looking at how this positions the team, the Minnesota Wild sit beneath just the Nashville Predators within the division and will do well to maintain that pace.
With their six point haul in the five game stretch, they’re right back into the average that’ll get you in the play-off picture.
They’ll need to find a way of stealing one more point each stint if they want to be right up there as Division and Conference challengers.
By comparison, the Nashville Predators are only losing once per five games, equating to eight points in each. That has to be the target the Minnesota Wild go for. Anything less would be setting a goal that is too easy.
Given the road games are over shortly and they’ve already started the next set of five with a win against the Ducks, maybe it’s actually achievable. Doing it every set of five consistently over the course of the year is the enduring challenge.
Next. Stalock deserves a bit more game time. dark
They’ll come a stretch eventually where it gets real hard to grind out that 1-0 mid-Winter win, but that is the difference between a good team and a great team!