The post Wild Need A Thrilling Kirill appeared first on Minnesota Hockey Magazine.

Judd Zulgad writes about what’s led to the extremely solid start to the season for the Minnesota Wild.

This story was originally published in the MHM 2024-25 High School Preview issue.

The post What A Wild Start appeared first on Minnesota Hockey Magazine.

The real test comes when the first adversity hits.

The Wild got a taste of that last week after starting a four-game trip with a 5-2 victory in Calgary. The Wild was blanked, 2-0, by Vancouver on Thursday and then lost 4-3 to Edmonton on Friday. That defeat was made worse when stand out defenseman Jonas Brodin suffered an upper body injury that’s expected him to sideline for several weeks.

The losses gave Hynes his first look at the warts on a team that was seven points out of a playoff spot when Evason was jettisoned following a seventh consecutive loss last month. Hynes didn’t hesitate to take action during a day off in Seattle.

He juggled the top two lines, which included breaking up BFFs Kirill Kaprizov and Mats Zuccarello. Kaprizov stayed on the top line with a new center (Joel Eriksson Ek) and winger (Matt Boldy), and Zuccarello was put on the second line with center Marco Rossi and Marcus Johansson.

So how did Kaprizov and Zuccarello react to being separated? Very well. The first line accounted for two goals, with Kaprizov assisting on Boldy’s score, and Rossi scored off a beautiful assist from Zuccarello in a 3-0 victory over the slumping Kraken.

That gave the Wild a 5-2 record under Hynes and pulled them within four points of a playoff spot in the Western Conference.

Hynes, in his third stop as an NHL coach, hasn’t done anything revolutionary since arriving in Minnesota, but it’s clear he’s willing to push buttons both when it comes to lineup construction and style.

The Wild are playing more of an uptempo style that is reminiscent of how they operated early on under Evason. An emphasis has been placed on puck movement and getting out of the defensive zone. The decision by general manager Bill Guerin to make a change also seems to have motivated a few players.

The top example is Boldy, who had one goal, eight points and was minus-5 in 12 games under Evason. In seven games under Hynes, Boldy has six goals, eight points and is plus-6. Boldy, who is 6-2, 201 pounds, has played so well of late that Hynes compared him to one of the Wild’s hardest working and best players on Sunday.

Matt Boldy has scored six of his seven goals this season since John Hynes arrived behind the bench. (MHM Photo / Rick Olson)

“(Boldy’s) such a talented player, but he is playing more and more like Ek in my opinion,” Hynes said. “He’s just a strong, big horse, a two-way player who gets offensive chances. He’s feeling confident for sure, which is nice to see. But his overall game is real strong.”

Hynes knows that comparing Boldy to Eriksson Ek will establish an expectation that means even when Boldy isn’t scoring a bunch, he will be expected to play a 200-foot game. That’s a fair expectation considering Boldy is in the first season of a seven-year, $49 million contract signed last January.

There remain players who need to get going — Johansson has only one goal and 11 points in 26 games in the first season of a two-year, $4 million contract, and Kaprizov only has three even-strength goals in 26 games — but the Wild’s goaltending duo of Filip Gustavsson and Marc-Andre Fleury has looked far better since the coaching change and the emergence of rookie Brock Faber as a top defenseman should help ease the loss of Brodin.

This doesn’t mean the Wild now have an easy path to the postseason. The 5-10-4 start under Evason left the Wild near the bottom of the conference and that means there is still plenty of digging out to do for a team that is now 10-12-4.

But Hynes has been pushing the right buttons and still has 56 regular-season games in which to try to lead his new team into a playoff position. Of course, it was only two weeks ago that the Wild appeared to be checked out on Evason and their season.

That is why Hynes’ greatest challenge remains ahead of him. The immediate jolt of his hire had the desired result and he weathered the first minor storm. Now, can he keep the lethargy that plagued this team at bay? If he does, Hynes could go from his couch to Jack Adams finalist all within the same season.

The post Jugglin’ Hynes appeared first on Minnesota Hockey Magazine.

Members of the University of Minnesota men’s hockey team played shinny on one of the ten pond hockey rinks set up adjacent to the NHL rink. (MHM Photo / Rick Olson)

“It’s such a wonderful atmosphere,” Wild coach Dean Evason said after the team’s fifth-consecutive loss. “Obviously, you want to leave with a good feeling but there are so many great things that have happened here the last couple of days.”

The coldest game in NHL history went on without a hitch, complete with multiple pond hockey games, a lumberjack demonstration, simulated ice fishing and a four-song first-intermission concert by country music star, Thomas Rhett. Nearly 40,000 people braved the frigid temps 

“I was looking over my shoulder for a polar bear, that’s how cold it was out there,” Wild assistant captain Marcus Foligno said.  “To see the fans stacked to the top, bracing the cold, that’s why we have the best fans, I believe. You could hear them and the cheer when we scored, too, was kind of an echo and it was a great feeling to play in this game.”

The Blues, who bussed to Target Field and entered the stadium adorned in beach wear, may have had a psychological edge early on in a game which saw the temp at -5.7 degrees Fahrenheit at puck drop and plummet from there. 

“You do suck a little wind out there,” Foligno said. “It’s tough to breathe that deep cold air but, I mean, you’re so caught up in the thrill of the game that it was a really fun atmosphere.”

St. Louis forward Jordan Kyrou watches his shot elude Wild goaltender Cam Talbot’s glove for his second goal of the game in the second period of Minnesota’s 6-4 Winter Classic loss to the Blues at Target Field. (MHM Photo / Rick Olson)

The game itself was primarily a 60-minute slog of a contest dominated by the Blues, a faster, more rugged squad for much of the night. Jordan Kyrou’s four-point (2-2–4) second period helped turn a 1-1 game into a 6-2 St. Louis lead after two periods and should have brought an end to Wild starting goaltender Cam Talbot’s rough night even if he hadn’t left the game due to a lower-body injury.

Wild coach Dean Evason doesn’t see it that way, however.

“We wouldn’t have taken him out of that game,” Evason said. “He’s a battler, he’s a competitive guy, we don’t take him out of that game because he’s still going to give us a chance to come back.”

Goals by Ryan Hartman and Kevin Fiala and some too-little-too-late inspired play in the final period, after Kaapo Kahkonen was pulled for an extra attacker with more than eight minutes remaining in regulation, made it semi-interesting. The question is, where was that effort for two lackluster periods in a game with so much riding on it in terms of both playoff positioning and national perception?

“It’s embarrassing, I think, the first two periods,” Wild forward Mats Zuccarello said. “You have 40,000 people coming, freezing their asses off and we’re playing like that. … There’s no excuses. It’s cold, it’s cold for both teams, the ice is bouncy for both teams, they just outplayed us for 40 minutes.

“It’s unfortunate it happened on a great night like this when a lot of people leave their house in this cold to support us and we give them a performance like that.”

Deer “roamed” Lake Winter Classic as people fished and made s’mores over a fire pit throughout the game. (MHM Photo / Rick Olson)

Kirill Kaprizov came to play, potting Minnesota’s first goal just 25 seconds after Blues forward David Perron opened the scoring and chipped in two assists. But that goal, redirected off the stick of Blues defenseman Niko Mikkola, and Rem Pitlick’s shot that ramped up a stick before bouncing off the back of a completely unaware Blues goalie Jordan Binnington, was all Minnesota could muster for 40 minutes. 

“They got to their game quicker than we got to ours and we didn’t get to ours, obviously, until the end,” Evason said. “We talked to the group about our sense of urgency has to be way quicker than the last 10 minutes of a hockey game when we’re pulling goalies. 

“They advanced and then they used their skill to score goals once they got in there.” 

That’s troubling, even with Joel Eriksson Ek, Jared Spurgeon and Jonas Brodin all sidelined. The same group somehow mustered 18 of its 33 total shots in the final period to finish with a flurry but it was still mostly a no-show performance. Opinions varied on the impact of the 11-day break between games leading up to the Winter Classic with Evason allowing for the fact his team was rusty.

“Hockey players need to play hockey, not practice hockey. We practiced well, got our touches and all that kind of stuff but, you know, you’ve got that rhythm of a season … and, unfortunately, now we’ve got another four days before we get going again.

“The situation is exactly what it is and we’ve got to find a way to correct our game here real quickly.”

Zuccarello, on the other hand, refused to let himself and his teammates off the hook.

“It doesn’t matter, it’s a big game for us. We lost four in a row, we’ve got to come out with some push and urgency and we didn’t do it. I don’t care when we last played, that is not acceptable for us as a team. I think we all know it.”

The post Winter Anticlimactic appeared first on Minnesota Hockey Magazine.