Minnesota sleeps through loss to Jets

The Minnesota Wild and 19,055 others on hand welcomed back the face of its franchise in the team’s annual Black Friday matinee contest at Xcel Energy Center. Assistant captain and crowd favorite Zach Parise played his first game since suffering a sprained MCL in his right knee three weeks ago.

Parise, who injured the knee on a hit from Nashville’s James Neal in a Nov. 5 3-2 loss to the Predators at Xcel Energy Center, was medically cleared to play and inserted into the lineup after missing eight games. Minnesota won its first three games without its star left wing but had slumped to 1-3-1 in its last five prior to Thanksgiving.

But Parise’s return wasn’t enough of a spark as Minnesota lost its second straight home game with a  3-1 loss to the Winnipeg Jets. Mathieu Parreault, Dustin Byfuglien and Nikolaj Ehlers scored for the Jets and rookie goaltender Connor Hellebuyck earned the win with just 14 saves in his first NHL start.

Minnesota coach Mike Yeo said he believes the Wild’s early-season success was misleading because some of the team’s inconsistencies were masked as their opponents struggled with similar issues.

“I think the early part of the year you get away with that stuff,” Yeo said. “I think we’re playing the same game, probably, that we were at the start of the year, but the league gets better and so right now we’re not getting away with those things.”

Ryan Carter got the Wild within a goal midway through the third with his third of the season. That made Byfuglien’s tally, a shot he banked off of Minnesota goaltender Devan Dubnyk from below the goal line, the eventual game winner. Dubnyk made 26 saves in taking the loss.

Yeo hinted after the game that backup goalie Darcy Kuemper would get the start on Saturday when the Dallas Stars, the top team in not only the Western Conference but the league itself, invades St. Paul.

Parise’s knee will be tested again right away against the Stars but he said he felt fine after playing 18:28 against the Jets.

“Hopefully better tomorrow but, for the first game in a while, it was okay, I thought,” Parise said. “Physically I felt fine. Felt a little behind in the conditioning but I was kind of expecting that.”

After participating in each of the Wild’s past two pregame skates on Saturday and Wednesday, Parise took part in his first full practice with the team since his injury on Thursday. He had been on the ice in previous practices but had been limited to skating on his own.

For a team decimated by injury and illness in recent weeks, Parise’s familiar No. 11 back on the ice and the bench was a welcome addition despite the loss. Center Tyler Graovac (20 games missed), right wing Justin Fontaine (11) and defenseman Marco Scandella (3) remain on injured reserve and center/wing Jordan Schroeder sat out his second straight game due to illness on Friday.

Parise’s return failed to have an immediate offensive impact as the Wild managed just three first-period shots on Winnipeg rookie goaltender Connor Hellebuyck, who was making his first NHL start. But he showed flashes of his usual disruptiveness, however, getting his stick in passing lanes and forechecking with a fury.

Parise said his team was chasing the puck all game which made things really tough.

“It’s tough to make plays, it’s tough to get shots when you never have the puck,” Parise said. “I feel like we’re throwing the puck away a lot, in the neutral zone especially.”

That’s how Yeo saw it too.

“We have individuals that have to understand that they have to pick their game up and I’m not talking about goals and assists,” Yeo said. “I think too many guys are going out there and they’re just getting the puck and they’re just, ‘Okay, let’s just go get a goal.’ Meanwhile, it’s a turnover and meanwhile, we keep losing momentum.”

The crowd was brought to its feet six minutes into the second period when Jason Pominville’s touch pass hit Parise in stride coming through the neutral zone. But Parise’s shot from the top of the left circle was swallowed up by Hellebuyck.

Wild defenseman Christian Folin was a college teammate and neighbor of Hellebuyck’s at Massachusetts-Lowell. While Folin was happy for his good friend, with whom he shares an agent, he wasn’t pleased his team didn’t provide him with much of a test.

“It’s fun for him, we really didn’t challenge him enough, though,” Folin said. “I mean, he’s a good goalie but we didn’t put up too many shots. He did a good job, good for him.”

Yeo said his players need to pick their personal play within the team concept and be better in the little areas of the Wild’s system.

“If it’s time to forecheck, you forecheck. If it’s time to be F3, be F3. If it’s time to execute and make a play, then make the play. We’ve got to get our eyes straight on what those little things are and what our best game looks like and how they can fit into that.”

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Minnesota drops another at home as Ovechkin scores twice

St. Paul — The Minnesota Wild have recently made an art of falling behind in games only to stage dramatic rallies late to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, including a recent 2-1 road win over the Washington Capitals.

It stands to reason, though, the practice would eventually catch up with the Wild and it did when the Capitals dropped by for a visit on Thursday night.

Goals by Alex Ovechkin and Evgeny Kuznetsov 39 seconds apart in a late second-period 4-on-4 situation put the Caps up 2-0 helping to lift Washington to a 3-2 win over Minnesota in front of 19,044 at Xcel Energy Center.

Caps’ goaltender Braden Holtby made 28 saves and Ovechkin scored twice — his league-leading 46th and 47th goals of the season — to lead Washington to its first-ever regulation win in St. Paul (1-7-1). The Florida Panthers now stand as the lone NHL team without a regulation victory at Xcel Energy Center.

“I think we did a really good job [on Ovechkin] for most of the night,” Wild coach Mike Yeo said. “But certainly that 4-on-4 was a key moment in the hockey game. We’re 0-0, I felt we were going pretty good, the next thing you know you’re down in a 2-0 hole, it changes the game.”

Ovechkin’s right circle blast directly off of a Nicklas Backstrom faceoff win at 3:05 of the third period gave the Capitals a 3-1 lead and ultimately proved to be the difference.

“His shot’s lethal,” Wild forward Chris Stewart said. “He probably has one of the best releases in the league so anytime you lose that faceoff clean there, in a split second it’s already in the back of the net.”

Defensemen Christian Folin and Jared Spurgeon scored for Minnesota while goaltender Devan Dubnyk lost just his sixth game in 29 starts in the Wild crease.

Winners of a franchise-record eight straight games on the road, the Wild have now lost four of their last six at home with the silver lining being they’ve all been decided by a single goal.

“I find that in a lot of these games we’re making one big mistake or there’s a couple breakdowns that we’re making that we haven’t been making on the road lately,” Yeo said. “I look back at our last two losses and we only have one 5-on-5 goal in our last two games so that, to me, is probably the big reason why we’re winless in our last two here.”

In a matchup of the NHL’s best penalty kill against the league’s top power play, the Wild prevailed in keeping Washington scoreless in four power-play opportunities. Minnesota has now killed off 64 of its opponents’ last 67 chances (95.5 percent) with the man advantage in its last 25 games.

Ovechkin broke open a scoreless stalemate through most of two periods with his league-leading  46th goal of the season at the 15:25 mark. With the teams skating 4-on-4, Ovechkin’s shot from the top of the left circle was stopped by Dubnyk but the speedy Russian followed his shot and beat Wild defenseman Ryan Suter to his own rebound for a 1-0 Caps lead.

Shortly thereafter, Kuzentsov doubled the Washington lead when he picked the pocket of Minnesota defenseman Jonas Brodin in the low slot and faked to his backhand before wrapping a forehand shot around a sprawling Dubnyk at 16:04.

“They capitalized on one of the few little hiccups we had tonight and all of a sudden it’s a 2-0 game as opposed to 0-0 and it just kind of changed the complexion of everything,” Minnesota assistant captain Zach Parise said.

The two goals in short order came a game after Nashville’s Roman Josi scored twice in 45 seconds to give the Predators a second period lead.

“Those are always key shifts [after goals] and you look at the game that we won in St. Louis and we were on the other side of it,” Yeo said. “You have to be able to brush that stuff off and you have to be able to come back out the next shift and be ready to do the job.”

With time winding down in the waning seconds of the middle frame, Folin saw an opportunity to join the rush with Zach Parise and Mikael Granlund and made the most of it. Folin’s received Granlund’s pass in stride below the dots and snapped shot between Holtby’s legs with 8.2 seconds remaining to cut the deficit to 2-1.

Spurgeon netted his ninth of the season on the power play with 5:56 remaining and Minnesota made a strong push for the tying goal in the final minutes but Holtby and the Capitals survived this time.

“Tonight we weren’t that far off,” Yeo said. “The game could have taken a much different turn many times along the game and it was a close game, but we’ll just look to bounce back in the next one.”

The next one comes Saturday in a 1 p.m. matinee affair at Xcel Energy Center against David Backes, TJ Oshie and the crew from St. Louis.

Schmidt’s return triumphant

Nearly two years to the day since his last Xcel Energy Center appearance, former Gopher Nate Schmidt spread out 11:19 of ice time over 17 shifts, fired one shot on goal and blocked one for the Capitals in his first game in St. Paul as a pro.

Schmidt, a St. Cloud native who registered 72 points (12g, 62a) in 96 games with Minnesota from 2012-13, last played on Xcel Energy Center ice on March 22, 2013 in the Gophers’ 2-0 loss to Colorado College in the semifinals of the WCHA Final Five.

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