St. Paul – It had to happen sometime: John Torchetti’s first loss as the Minnesota Wild’s interim coach.

The Wild (27-23-10) snapped a season-long four-game winning streak with a 4-1 loss to the New York Islanders (32-19-7) Tuesday night at Xcel Energy Center. The Wild haven’t won at the X in 2016; the last win came Dec. 28.

Tuesday, the Wild put up just one goal. They scored at least five per game during the recent win streak.

“We didn’t talk tonight,” Torchetti said. “We end up getting a penalty from not talking.

“We had no push back tonight. Nothing was going our way.”

It was tough from the start. New York’s Matt Martin scored 1:36 into the game for an early Wild deficit. Things really didn’t improve much from there. Frans Nielsen scored the first of his two goals later in the first period (He added an empty netter.). Justin Fontaine had a solid chance at the end of the first, but he couldn’t quite lift the puck over goaltender Jaroslav Halak’s pad. Thomas Vanek, who led the team with five shots on goal, also had a chance in the second, with a shot off the post.

Special teams was the difference in the game.

The Islanders went 2-for-3 on the power play, while the Wild went 0-for-5 against the league’s best penalty kill. Torchetti saw a couple chances he liked on their power play, but they “were trying to be too fine with it.”

Coming into the game, the Wild had scored a power play goal in 11 of its past 13 games and in each of the past four. The Wild is tied for fourth in the league with 12 power-play goals since Jan. 21.

“Their power play was better than ours tonight,” Chris Porter said. “But our power play’s been carrying us the last few games.”

Overall, they weren’t pushing the puck, according to Jarret Stoll.

“We were too lackadaisical… with the puck in our zone and the neutral zone,” Stoll said.

On the Wild’s lone goal, Porter found himself in the right place at the right time: In front of the crease with a juicy rebound bouncing to his stick.

Porter, playing in his first game since Feb. 6 in St. Louis, scored his fourth goal of the season to make it a 2-1 with 27 seconds remaining in the second period. It ­was a huge goal for the Wild at the time, as it avoided going into the second intermission down 2-0.

The goal came off a Marco Scandella shot from the point which bounced off Mikael Granlund in front and the puck squirted to Porter to put it away. Porter finished the game with a team-low 14 shifts and 8:16 of ice time. He also had two shots and two hits.

Unfortunately, the Wild couldn’t keep any momentum it gained from that goal into the third period. John Tavares scored a power play goal 2:42 into the third, giving the Islanders a two-goal cushion they didn’t relinquish. Shots on goal for the game were even at 31 apiece.

“Tonight we were a little bit sloppy with our puck playing,” Porter said. “And that ended up costing us.”

Torchetti called the loss “a bump in the road” and said they need to have better shot attempts and do a better job with puck possession. The Wild heads back on the road for games in Philadelphia and Washington.

“They’ll bounce back,” Torchetti said.

The post Back to Earth appeared first on Minnesota Hockey Magazine.

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.”

The post No offense, but Wild still not scoring appeared first on Minnesota Hockey Magazine.