But Joel Eriksson Ek tied the game 2-2 officially with 22 seconds remaining in regulation Tuesday night against the Anaheim Ducks at Xcel Energy Center. That goal helped send the Wild to the playoffs; all they needed was one point in the game, which they achieved when they sent the game to overtime.

With the playoff spot clinched at the end of regulation, starting goaltender Filip Gustavsson wanted a word with coach John Hynes at the bench.

“He came to me and just said, ‘We get in, do you think we could put Flower in?’” Hynes said. “I was like, ‘Yeah, great idea.’”

So, as the teams prepared for the reset before 3-on-3 overtime, backup netminder Marc-Andre Fleury got off the bench and started stretching on the ice. Fans noticed, and the cheers grew louder as he took his place in the crease. The 40-year-old goaltender was coming in cold. But the move was heartwarming.

He was thrown right into the fire, too, as the Wild went on the penalty kill just 18 seconds into overtime, the only Wild penalty of the night.

No worries. The Flower squeezed a vintage performance into the overtime period that lasted nearly the full five minutes. Fleury made five saves in his 4:42 of ice time to earn his 575th career victory. Along the way, he also got some help from his friend, the goal post, with a Ducks shot that just missed. He made sure to thank the post in his traditional way, by giving it a quick tap with his glove hand. Fleury also made a sprawling pad save earlier in the sequence.

Marc-Andre Fleury won his 575th career game on Tuesday night, playing only the overtime period. (MHM Photo / Rick Olson)

“That was just an unbelievable regular season ending to Marc-Andre Fleury’s career,” said winger Marcus Foligno. “To come in and get awarded a penalty, too, to kill a penalty kill, we’re all looking at each other like are you kidding me? I can’t believe the ref called that to just throw Flower under the bus like that. And then to see two poke-check saves and a post and keep playing the puck, too, it was electric and it’s so fitting for the way you can end that guy’s regular-season career.”

His saves helped keep overtime alive, and the Wild eventually won the game 3-2 on a Matt Boldy goal with 18 seconds left. While it’s traditional to mob the player who scored the game winner, Fleury’s teammates mobbed him near center ice.

“I think our fate was winning the game like we did,” said Wild defenseman Jake Middleton. “Maybe it was fate to go to overtime and get Flower in net the way we did, too. What a all-class move by Gus there, too. Very cool.”

A fond memory
Fleury said he was “very surprised,” plus a little shocked and a little worried when he was called upon for overtime.

“I’d been sitting there for a few hours,” Fleury said. “A good talk from Gus, and obviously Hynes let me go in, too. I’m happy I got to go play just a little bit more at home.”

He was a much happier hockey player than six days earlier when he stood in front of his locker stall following another Wild overtime win, but in that topsy-turvy game against San Jose, Fleury allowed seven goals. That game last Wednesday was set up to be his final home start of the regular season in his career. Afterward, he could only take solace in the fact that the team got the important two points, and the emotions of the national anthem, when his three children joined him in the goal crease.

“I think I’ll remember the national anthem and having two points,” Fleury said, after the game against San Jose.

The Wild had a chance to win-and-get-in in Calgary on Friday, but they lost 4-2 and Fleury saw a few minutes in net late in the game when Gustavsson was pulled. That meant Fleury didn’t start in Vancouver the next night either, which was a likely plan, but the Wild still needed the valuable points and went with Gustavsson in net.

It looked like Fleury might not see meaningful minutes or get another shot at a regular-season sendoff. Until overtime, with the relief of the playoff clinch scenario in the bag.

“I feel lucky to have another chance to play in front of them,” Fleury said, of his family in attendance and the Wild fans, who went nuts for his entrance into the game and showered him with “FLEURY! FLEURY!” chants. “Get a win. Not give up seven goals. That was nice, too. Hopefully they remember that time.

Fleury had tears in his eyes by the end of the postgame media session: “It was fun to go one more time out there and play the game I love. That was cool.” 

After the victory, the Wild players and fans saluted Fleury as he stood at center ice with a graphic on the videoboard above thanking him: “Merci Fleury.”

Flower deserves all his flowers. That seems to be the unanimous opinion among Wild players.

“Every compliment, everything that’s been thrown his way, he deserves,” Middleton said. “He’s just one of the best dudes in hockey.

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Devan Dubnyk’s lack of support extends deeper into 2016

Anaheim, Calif. – The head-scratching among Minnesota Wild personnel seems contagious.

That’s because there is no easy answer to a diabolical stretch in which the Wild have scored just four goals through five consecutive losses.

Coach Mike Yeo took a long time to emerge from his dressing room Wednesday night after the latest Wild loss, a 3-1 defeat by the Anaheim Ducks at the Honda Center.

“Tough stretch,” Yeo said.

Indeed.

The Wild won on Dec. 31 to end 2015 with a 20-10-6 record, but after that both the calendar and the Wild flipped over.

They’ve won just two of 10 games in 2016, cannot buy a power-play goal and have struggled mightily in nearly every third period.

“I feel for the guys right now,” Yeo said.

The Wild changed up their power-play units and have juggled personnel here and there without success. Yeo said the effort was strong and the team’s defense played tough, but that all came crashing down when Anaheim’s Rickard Rakell tapped in a back-door pass from Patrick Maroon with just 6:19 remaining in the third period.

When players are not scoring, Yeo muttered, “some of that detail starts to slip. The second goal’s a good example of that; I thought we gave them that one.”

Minnesota, which jumps back into action against the Kings in Los Angeles Thursday night, has scored just once on its past 32 power plays and has just 16 goals in its past 10 games.

“We had some chances,” forward Charlie Coyle said. “It just comes down to that we can’t put the puck in the net.”

Zach Parise, who plays on a line with Mikael Granlund and Jason Pominville, said it’s up to him and his linemates to get the Wild out of their scoring slump, and they have not been doing that.

“Our job is to score goals,” he said. “We need to shape up a little bit.”

Asked about his team’s dearth of shots in the past four third periods, when they have accumulated just 24 shots on goal, Parise shook his head.

“That’s an interesting stat,” he said. “I didn’t know that.”

Wild players talked before the game about “keeping it simple,” and they did just that, firing the puck deep behind the Ducks’ goal early and often.

Then the Ducks simply picked up the puck and brought it back out.

Minnesota’s snake-bit offense occasionally looked more like a two-bit offense. The only Wild goal came on a wrister from the slot by fourth-line center Jarrett Stoll, Stoll’s first goal since he was picked up on waivers five weeks ago.

“We had chances tonight,” Granlund noted, “but right now that’s just not enough for a win.”

Everyone with Minnesota seems bewildered by the lack of punch on offense. The assignment for the players, Coyle noted, is to not worry about it.

“You can’t let it get in your head,” he said.

It obviously is, however.

Yeo is trying to look at the bright side. In his fifth season as Wild coach, he has endured mid-season slumps too often before but noted that those slumps seem to have toughened his guys.

“Quite often,” he said, “when we’ve come out of these things, we’ve come out of them and gone on a run.”

The way out, he went on, remains the same as it did before.

“We’ve got to play tight and we’ve got to continue to defend as well as we have been,” he explained. “We can’t lose any focus on that part of our game, but we’ve got to find a way to create some more.”

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Dubnyk blanks Anaheim, Minnesota wins 3-0

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Thomas Vanek is back in the goal scoring business

Saint Paul – As a Minnesota power play expired in the second period Saturday evening, Thomas Vanek held the puck near the outside of the right faceoff circle and appeared to be looking for someone to get open in front of the net.

Nothing doing.

So Vanek, who became something of a fans’ whipping boy a year ago when his numbers were less than gaudy during his first Wild season, teed up the puck and rifled a bullseye over the left shoulder of Anaheim Ducks goaltender Frederick Andersen.

“I had a little time there and I was looking for something, someone to pass it to,” Vanek said.

Nino Niederreiter skated in front, offering a screen, and Vanek pounced.

“I just went for it and it worked out perfect,” he said.

It was a true goal-scorer’s goal and pretty much what Minnesota fans expected from the former Gophers star last season, when Vanek was beset by injuries and struggled to stitch together a total of 21 goals.

This goal gave the Wild a 2-0 lead en route to a 3-0 victory over the struggling Ducks Saturday in front of 19,034 at the Xcel Energy Center, and it gave Vanek four goals in seven games this season and 302 goals in his career.

It might have been five and 303, but he had a goal taken away in the home opener against St. Louis when officials ruled the puck caromed into the net off linemate Charlie Coyle.

Vanek seemed unfazed by that decision, emphasizing later that it counted as a goal no matter who last touched it.

But the 31-year-old Austrian who led the Gophers to the 2003 NCAA title knows why the Wild signed him as a free agent in 2014 and what the fans expect.

His business card: Goal-scorer.

Never the fastest skater in the building, the 6-foot-2, 218-pounder looks like a different player this season. He’s well on his way to his 11^th consecutive 20-goal season because he’s healthy.

“Healthy,” he repeated Saturday. “A lot of guys play hurt, and I play hurt, too. Right now I’m not, and it’s good to be out there not lagging my leg behind. It feels nice.”

A year ago, hobbled by groin problems, the puck wasn’t going in for Vanek. He did not score his first goal of the season until his 10^th game, got his fourth goal in Minnesota’s 29^th game and seemed perfectly content to dish the puck to someone else.

Would he have shot in the second period a year ago?

Probably not.

“I love the fact that he’s shooting more pucks,” Wild coach Mike Yeo said. “Obviously, he’s got a great shot. I don’t know that he was taking those shots last year.”

Yeo says he sees a different Vanek this season, but not just because goals are coming.

“Him getting goals is one thing, but to me it’s as much about how he’s playing without the puck. He’s digging in to the system; he’s digging in defensively. When a player’s doing that stuff, obviously you’re real pleased that he gets rewarded for it,” Yeo explained.

Vanek said he felt zero pressure coming back a year ago to where he starred in college, but he’s definitely more comfortable in his second season with the Wild.

“I know I can score goals,” he said.

Knowing all the players, the coaches and the equipment staff from the start has allowed him to feel more at home, however.

But he’s not satisfied.

“I know I can be better,” he said. “I’ve still feel I’ve got a little bit more, but it’s a good start so far.”

Matt Dumba scored his first goal of the season late in the first period to get the Wild offense started, then displayed a major-league celebration. Ryan Carter’s short-handed goal late in the second period capped the goal-scoring, and Devan Dubnyk made 15 saves to record his first shutout of the season.

Anaheim, which took five of the game’s six penalties and hobbled away from the X with a 1-5-1 mark, recorded its lone victory against Minnesota a week ago. The turnabout on Saturday left the Wild with a terrific 5-1-1 record going into a Sunday game at Winnipeg.

Vanek will be there, looking to extend a two-game goal streak.

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Ducks hold on for 2-1 win over Minnesota, sweep season series

St. Paul — Those hoping for a Wild-Anaheim postseason playoff matchup might want to re-think their wants.

The NHL-leading Ducks withstood nearly everything the Wild offense had to offer Friday night and escaped the Xcel Energy Center with a 2-1 victory in front of 19,045, the 500th regular-season sellout for Minnesota.

Anaheim goalie John Gibson made 32 saves and the Wild went just 1 for 5 on the power play to suffer their sixth consecutive home loss to the Ducks.

The Ducks swept the season series 3-0 from Minnesota.

All three losses were by one goal, and there is little question that the Wild had a territorial edge for much of the evening Friday, but the Ducks held on.

“We had some good chances late in the game but we just weren’t able to bury it,” Wild defenseman Ryan Suter said. “That’s a good team. Their goalie played well.”

And suddenly, that spell of Minnesota reeling off one win after another is just a memory: Not only was this the Wild’s second loss in a three-game homestand, it kicked off a very difficult closing run for a team that has little room for error.

The Wild packed their bags Friday night for a flight to St. Louis and a Saturday match against the Blues, then get the Nashville Predators, the Washington Capitals and the Blues again in the coming week.

The good news: Friday’s result left the Wild with 81 points, tied with Calgary for fifth most in the Western Conference and still three points ahead of Winnipeg in the wild-card race.

“I don’t think we can be too down,” Wild coach Mike Yeo said. “It stinks not getting two points, but we just have to keep things in perspective. We did a lot of good things.”

Yeo and Suter both lamented the Wild’s missed power-play chances.

“It’s been a tough year with the power play,” Suter observed. “We’ve gone through good stretches. We scored one tonight and we scored one last game right as it expired, the game before right as it expired. So we’re getting some goals, but like in the game tonight, we’ve got to be better.

“It’s a power-play, penalty-kill game, and we’ve got to be able to get a couple.”

The Wild rank 28th in the NHL with just a 15-percent success ratio with a man advantage.

“It hasn’t been an issue because we’ve been winning games,” Yeo said. “Certainly going forward it’s something we’re going to have to address.”

The Wild’s lone goal came when Thomas Vanek’s bad-angle shot went directly to Zach Parise in front, who put it away on the power play.

That tied the score 1-1, but Matt Dumba’s turnover led to a goal by the Ducks’ Jakob Silfverberg just 2:14 later and that proved to be the winner.

“That was just a bad play by me,” Dumba admitted.

Everyone makes mistakes, Yeo pointed out, but they loom large when the opposition is Anaheim, which leads the league with 93 points.

“It seems like every time we play them it starts to feel like there’s one play that’s going to make the difference in the game,” he said. “Obviously it’s not exactly one play, but there were certainly moments in that game, whether it’s on one side or the other, that we could have grabbed ahold of it.”

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Power-play scores twice but Anaheim ducks Minnesota’s comeback bid

Just because the Wild take a period off this season, don’t turn off the TV and start crossing things off your list of Christmas chores.

This team somehow has a way of making things interesting.

A lackluster game for 23 minutes made a quick 180 Friday night at the Xcel Energy Center before the Anaheim Ducks absconded with what turned out to be a 5-4 white-knuckle victory.

Darcy Kuemper was the victim of this loss, facing 18 shots and stopping 13.

He felt fine, he said, and some of the Ducks’ goals were worthy.

“But it doesn’t matter if they’re good goals or not, you can’t be letting in five,” he said.

Coach Mike Yeo saluted his team’s comeback to take the lead with four consecutive goals, but added that, in reality, it was nevertheless a loss.

“There’s no reason any of us should feel good about that,” he said.

Wild defenseman Ryan Suter missed his second game because of the mumps, but the Ducks lost forward Corey Perry to a lower-body injury when Keith Ballard upended him with his patented hip check in the first period.

Despite that, this game had the feel of a snoozer as Anaheim constructed a 3-0 lead.

“We can’t start out flat like that,” forward Zach Parise said.

The strangest development: It was the so-far woeful power play that resuscitated Minnesota’s game.

The Wild came into this game 7 for 78 with a man advantage to rank 29th in the NHL, and they failed to click during a first-period power play to make it 7 for 79.

But Anaheim tempted fate in the second period when Ryan Getlaf flipped the puck over the glass from his own zone for a delay-of-game penalty, and 28 seconds later Ryan Kesler – he had scored twice by then – high sticked Parise.

Mikko Koivu made the Ducks pay when he sneaked a bad-angle shot through Ducks goalie Frederik Anderson with the Wild on a 5-on-3 advantage, and 11 seconds later Parise rifled in another power-play goal to make it 3-2 at the 5:10 mark of the second period.

That brought the X crowd of 19,044 to life after a sluggish first 20 minutes in which Anaheim outshot the home team 7-4 and outscored the Wild 2-0.

It was 1-0 just 91 seconds after the opening faceoff after Kesler got loose for a breakaway goal.

Ugh.

“We didn’t have the start we needed,” Yeo understated.

Minnesota finally pulled even on a shot by Jonas Brodin late in the second period, then went ahead 4-3 on Justin Fontaine’s blast at 2:07 of the third.

But Anaheim was not finished, getting a goal from Tim Jackman 80 seconds after Fontaine’s goal and another score from Matt Belesky 8:28 into the final period.

Although the big rally had whipped up the crowd, the Wild did not have another one.

“It sucks,” Parise said.

Offered Kuemper: “We battled back good and got in front; it’s tough to give that up.”

This was the third time in his past four home starts that Kuemper has been pulled; Nik Backstrom played the final half of the third period.

Yeo seemed satisfied with his team’s power play and satisfied that his team limited the Ducks to 21 total shots and, he estimated, no more than 10 decent scoring chances.

However, whether this game became entertaining or not, he was not satisfied with how it turned out.

“The bottom line is, if we score four goals we should win,” he said.

Notes: Brodin picked up some of the slack from Suter’s absence, playing 28 minutes, 29 seconds and getting a goal and an assist. … Jason Zucker led the Wild with six shots. … Ballard contributed three hits. … Thomas Vanek had no shots, one giveaway and was a minus-2. Nino Niederreiter, Marco Scandella and Jared Spurgeon were each minus-3.

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