2022 MN WILD/NHL THREAD

tswoboda wrote:

Just flat out not true. Coyotes made the playoffs in 2020 and knocked the Predators out of the play-in round. Year before that, 1 spot out of the playoffs. Last year they finished 5th in the West, 1 spot out of the playoffs. Not saying they were ever good, but calling them the “WORST” before this season is some massive hyperbole. Your wingers take is wrong too… He mostly played with a combination of Taylor Hall, Phil Kessel and Connor Garland in 2020 and Phil Kessel and Clayton Keller in 2021. Oh and his most common D on the ice both seasons was the Chychrun/Goligoski pairing. So saying he didn’t get to play with good players couldn’t be farther from the truth. He only played with Arizona’s best players.

Hmm, I always saw Stepan play 1C whenever the Wild played the Coyotes…I guess I stand corrected…imo he still doesn’t deserve to be anywhere in the same conversation with Rask…

JoeMX1825 wrote:

Ha! That was my question to him and LaBrun! I owned a Skeeterzx225 when I created my Twitter account

That’s hilarious! You definitely have a pattern lol.

Nice to know we have a straight line of communication to Russo now

Just as I feared Gigi again tonight!

127

Boys looking good so far. Bjugstad has been fantastic since he came back.

I just can’t watch when she calls a game. At least the Wolves are on tonight.

dentedboatguy wrote:

I just can’t watch when she calls a game. At least the Wolves are on tonight.

She’s not calling the game.
Is there anyone better in tight spaces with the puck then Boldy?

We lost 18 of 23 draws that period… unreal

JoeMX1825 wrote:

We lost 18 of 23 draws that period… unreal

Some of that was on the wings though but yeah its not good. What’s worse is it appears Ek is dinged up.

Dvorak doesn’t do much for me and makes little sense to ad a mediocre center. Especially one with term.

Freddy hockey

Ripjiggen wrote:

Dvorak doesn’t do much for me and makes little sense to ad a mediocre center. Especially with one with term.

Agreed

Foligno and Hartman look disinterested… no where near the energy they had the first half…Foligno’s gotta be playing hurt, he’s doing tons of stick checks and turning away instead of finishing checks.

Ripjiggen wrote:

Dvorak doesn’t do much for me and makes little sense to ad a mediocre center. Especially with one with term.

when there was tons of uncertainty with Rossi 2 years ago I was interested in Dvorak due to the low aav, now it makes zero sense…no idea what Louie was thinking today… it was awkward for sure, the look on Mileski’s face said it all…

This is the grind part of the season. Wild just about guarantee 2nd or 3rd in there division. Should start to ramp back up end of March. Hard to get all guys up for a game this part of the season. Just nature of a long season.

That shorthanded shift by Hartman was the most energy i’ve seen from him in several games…

Hartman hasn’t been great the last few games. I’m hoping he picks it up soon but I’m probably going to order something tonight that I won’t remember tomorrow.

KK not having a great game. Missed passes a couple turnovers. Fiala looks ok but missing a bit of spark. Boldy looking like the best forward tonight. Sturm and the Dewey line has had some chances. I mentioned earlier Foligno is playing hurt or something else is going on. He hasn’t been the same since that Winnipeg game where he took a pretty good a$$ kicking. Maybe he lost some confidence.

Ice Cap wrote:

Just as I feared Gigi again tonight!

Dammit Ice Cap can’t you get Gigi out of here on this road trip!

JoeMX1825 wrote:

Foligno and Hartman look disinterested… no where near the energy they had the first half…Foligno’s gotta be playing hurt, he’s doing tons of stick checks and turning away instead of finishing checks.

I get the feeling a lot of them are banged up right now by the way they’ve played the last few games.

Lots of good teams got destroyed last night…Wild in another slump, every team goes through them…

JoeMX1825 wrote:

Lots of good teams got destroyed last night…Wild in another slump, every team goes through them…

Looks like the Canucks ended Calgary’s 10 game win streak.

Lots of chatter by the talking heads about the Wild’s total inability to win faceoffs. Not just last night but it’s a consistent issue. Kills any sustained offensive pressure. It’s something they need to fix if they are going anywhere in the play offs. So will this force BG’s hand in trading for that center that can win face offs? Or can this be fixed internally by more focus on it in practice with our current set of centers or is it a case of a player can either win face offs or can’t and no amount of practice can move the needle more than a couple percentage points.

It’s just one more obstacle the Wild have from becoming true contenders. You can fix that by bringing in someone but that one person is not going to be taking all the face offs so you only partially fix the problem. Then as we have talked the size and age of our D and our goaltending are issues. All this points to the Wild not quite being there yet and it can’t all be fixed at once. Not trying to throw cold water on a great season but I believe it to be the facts of the matter. I for one would hate to see BG move some prospects or players to bring in a rental that will only fix one issue. I think the best move is to stand pat and focus on keeping the core group together and Boldy as much as possible for going forward. But I could be and have been wrong before.

They showed at a stat line last night during the game showing that Toronto was like top 5 for Face-Offs and the Wild were 27th in the league. Only way to fix that is upgrade a center which we have been all talking about.

KP wrote:

They showed at a stat line last night during the game showing that Toronto was like top 5 for Face-Offs and the Wild were 27th in the league.

I saw that too. I knew the Wild havent been good on faceoffs, but had no idea it was THAT bad.

I try to bite my tongue about the faceoff thing but man is that ever an overblown stat. I get that it’s nice to win draws, especially d-zone & o-zone. BUT there’s a million more important parts to a game than the faceoffs. It’s just the easiest thing for fans to see on TV so of course they go for the low hanging fruit. And how do you even address it at the trade deadline? Go get a faceoff specialist like Luke freaking Glendenning and now he’s going to be out there on the powerplay, 6v5, start of OT, etc? No. They’d have to trade for 2 new top 6 centers to actually fix it. The issue is Ek and Hartman. Freddy and Sturm/Bjugy combo are both right around or above 50%.

If you don’t believe faceoffs are overblown then just check the teams who are worse than the wild at faceoffs: Aves, Panthers, and Capitals. Amazing they can ever win a game without winning every faceoff.

Faceoff win% is probably the only stat where the 5 worst teams in the league are actually better teams with better records than the 5 best teams.

Thank you. I will post some articles later explaining how over blown this stat really is.

tswoboda wrote:

If you don’t believe faceoffs are overblown then just check the teams who are worse than the wild at faceoffs: Aves, Panthers, and Capitals. Amazing they can ever win a game without winning every faceoff.

Faceoff win% is probably the only stat where the 5 worst teams in the league are actually better teams with better records than the 5 best teams.

Ya that is a pretty telling stat right there. The Avalanche and Panthers are literally the top team in each conference.

At the same time, we’ve all seen goals that are a direct result of a won (or lost) faceoff in the offensive zone. Is there a correlation between goals scored and offensive zone faceoffs won? I would say there is even if its not a metric that’s measured.

I can remember years ago when Detroit was the dominant team in the NHL and a large part of their game was puck possession. They were successful for a long period of time because they simply had the puck more often than their opponent. NHL teams don’t really play that way anymore but I have to imagine that faceoff win percentage played a role in puck possession for the Red Wings during that era.

Regardless of the stats and %, There’s ZERO excuses why our existing centers have been so bad, it’s all technique, strength does have some to do with it on a 50/50, but it’s just technique and practice…I pay close attention to it only because I played Center my entire life, watching the Wild take draws is frustrating because it appears they don’t have a plan at all (honestly the only center who consistantly looked like he had a plan on draws was Rask, and you know me saying something positive about Rask is difficult, but its true) to me it just looks like they don’t practice it enough both on the ice and more importantly in the video room (I have no idea if that’s the case, but that’s just what it looks like)

A perfect example of this has been the important draws and the end of a few games we’ve won recently. The Carolina win is a great example, where the Wild had a 1 goal lead late with 2 defensive zone draws with less than 30 seconds left in the game. They put Sturm out there and his ONLY strategy/goal should have been to disable the opposing center’s stick and basically suffocate the draw, but instead he was trying to pull them back and win them clean? This resulted in 2 absolute clean pull back draw wins for Carolina and 2 point blank shots on net and subsequent rebound chaos, absolute failure in execution obviously, but also the strategy was flawed to start…

They should have Koivu working with these guys every practice…but I guess he’s a suit now???

I agree that 5-5 faceoffs are a meh stat as they rountinely just turn into a dump and chase anyways, but Powerplay/Penalty kill and end of game % can have HUGE game implications…You lose 2-3 draws on the power play and that’s an easy 40-50 lost seconds retrieving the puck back in your zone and making additional zone entries, reverse that positively for the penalty kill…end of game defensive draws are likely done with the opposing team having the extra skater on the ice, so a faceoff loss immediately puts the defenders in scramble mode and we’ve seen what the Wild have been able to do in that situation this year…

Maybe there is too much emphasis on faceoffs. I used to get sick of hearing how good Koivu was at faceoffs. I would say big deal you still have to do something with the puck after you get it. But it was glaring last night at the end of the game. Wild had Kaako pulled and behind a goal. I think there was 1:40 left and the Wild lost two faceoffs during that time if I remember correctly. Losing those two faceoffs and having to go back and chase the puck probably cost them 30 to 40 seconds that could have otherwise been spent in the offensive zone where they were buzzing.

Now you extrapolate all those lost faceoffs over three periods and you are losing a lot of time not having the puck right? No body is talking about winning every faceoff but being that bad in the faceoff circle may pose a bigger problem to the Wild than it does other teams. The Avalanche and Panthers are better all around teams than the Wild and can overcome that hole in their game. Yes the Wild have won a lot of games this season by late comebacks and scoring two goals in the last minutes to either tie or win. Did they lose faceoffs in those games too? Probably. But they would make their lives much easier by upping that part of their game because when the magic stops you need to be more solid in those area of the games to compensate.

I’m not a numbers stat guy like you guys are but I know what I see.