The Minnesota Wild’s frailties were there, plain to see, in their 7-2 loss to the Edmonton Oilers on Friday night. You can lay blame in many places, but quite simply they were out-worked and out-coached.
Road-trips through Western Canada are never the easiest trips, regardless of the way their opposition had been playing. Likewise, you can also bemoan the loss of the Minnesota Wild’s captain, Mikko Koivu in the loss to the Calgary Flames.
It’s easy to make excuses, but there was far more wrong with the team both on the night and in general of late.
Against the Edmonton Oilers, the Minnesota Wild looked slow and truly struggled with maintaining possession in the early going (logging a feeble 41.67% Corsi For in the first period), and paid the price as a result. You can write some of the sluggish-ness and inability to control the puck on the fact it was a back-to-back, but realistically, it’s not a new problem.
The Minnesota Wild are an older team, with one of the higher average ages in the NHL. The league is moving towards a younger, quicker style and the Wild are now struggling, after giving up so many draft picks in pursuit of success, to keep up.
With the Edmonton Oilers seeming to have turned a corner under the auspices of Ken Hitchcock, the Wild were unable to break through them.
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They defended as a unit, transitioned through the neutral zone like the Wild weren’t there half the time and spent prolonged periods forcing the Minnesota Wild to defend.
When you have players of the calibre of Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl in the opposing line-up, you don’t want to be spending time trapped in your own defensive zone.
To add to the fact that the Wild were trumped on both possession and zone time, you can’t help but notice that Devan Dubnyk, once again, cracked with the pressure of the shots his defense allowed him to face.
It’s never going to be a great night when the second shot on you goes in, and when Ryan Nugent-Hopkins forced a bouncing puck in for the Oilers’ second, you sensed that this wasn’t Vezina-calibre Dubnyk we would be seeing on the night.
Eventually, he found himself pulled in favour of Alex Stalock after dropping three goals on six shots. His performance is pretty indicative of the form we’re seeing of late from both the defense and Dubnyk himself.
If the Minnesota Wild are to have any chance of cracking even the wild-card spot this year; Devan Dubnyk needs to find some form, they need to find a tactic that can slow a speedier team, heck even a trap game wouldn’t be bad and most of all they need to work out how to create decent time in the offensive zone.
All in all, a result like this isn’t really that unfair on the Minnesota Wild. It was long overdue and with any luck it’s the wake-up call that they need. The team can’t be over-reliant upon goaltending and must learn to better defend speed and skill.