Wild’s locker room door stays closed longer than usual after yet another loss

DALLAS — Mike Rupp, the hard-nosed former Stanley Cup champion and observer of all 32 teams, always has a soft spot for the Wild.

His last two seasons in an 11-year NHL career were spent in Minnesota and he always seems to pump their tires and respect the team assembled.

But on Wednesday’s “The Athletic Hockey Show,” the NHL Network analyst made clear he’s worried the Wild are going to miss the playoffs for only the second time since 2013.

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“I really am,” Rupp said. “That game the other night against the Coyotes might come back and bite the Wild. This Wild team’s success has come by their attention to detail. They’re coached well, they’re disciplined in the way they play, or they’re supposed to be. They haven’t really been that over the past number of weeks.

“They’re eking their way by against teams they shouldn’t just get by and they’re not scoring many goals.”

Rupp noted the six penalties they took in Arizona, the miscommunication off a faceoff before Jakob Chychrun’s second goal and two defensemen getting caught, which led to Mats Zuccarello’s bad read en route to Jack McBain’s winner.

“You can’t have that, man,” Rupp said. “This is a team that thrives on details, and the details haven’t been there. I’m concerned about them.”

He should be.

Fast forward two days, and the Wild did plenty of good things and still lost to the Dallas Stars, 4-1.

“We’re pissed,” defenseman Jake Middleton said after the Wild leaders closed the door to the locker room and held a brief team meeting with the Wild’s position in the standings unbelievably fragile considering where they were before losing five of their past seven games. “There’s really no other way to put it at this point. We know we’re not in that third spot anymore (in the division) and the coming weeks are pretty important.

“So (Thursday) night, we got a homestand of what is it seven games? We have to play really desperate for the next stretch here.”

Against the conference-leading Stars, the Wild generated 39 shots on Vezina Trophy contender Jake Oettinger, including 38 at even strength. They only took one penalty, and that was a dubious one at best. And they scored a power-play goal.

Really poor defense from the #mnwild, let Jamie Benn walk right in 1-0 #texashockey tough sequence for the GREEF line and the Dumba Goligoski pairing

— Alex Micheletti (@AlexMicheletti) February 9, 2023

Yet, after a scoreless first period, Marcus Foligno doesn’t get a puck deep, Joel Eriksson Ek gives up a breakaway and 23 seconds into the period it’s 1-0 Stars as Jamie Benn skated up the gut. A bad pinch by Calen Addison led to an odd-man rush and a second goal by Radek Faksa, then a feeble forecheck by the Jordan Greenway-Eriksson Ek-Foligno line led to an odd-man rush and a third goal by Jani Hakanpaa.

Radek Faksa taps home the perfect give-and-go return pass from Seguin, doubling the Stars lead to 2!#TexasHockey

— Hockey Daily 365 l NHL Highlights (@HockeyDaily365) February 9, 2023

This is stuff that cannot happen when you’re ranked 28th in the NHL at five-on-five scoring.

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“The margin of error is small when you’re not scoring and at this moment we’re not,” coach Dean Evason said. “So an error quickly ends up in our net and it’s such an uphill battle for us. Having said that we didn’t quit. We kept competing. We kept battling.”

Eriksson Ek on the power play!! #MNwild get on the board! 🚨🚨

— Bally Sports North (@BallySportsNOR) February 9, 2023

Eriksson Ek scored his 19th goal on a power play with 1:44 left in the period and just 32 seconds later, the Wild appeared to cut the deficit to one on Ryan Hartman’s goal. But referee Dan O’Rourke wiped out the goal because of incidental contact on Oettinger by Greenway.

Evason opted not to challenge. He felt Greenway took a route where he skated into the crease on his own. He was surely helped onto Oettinger by defenseman Miro Heiskanen, but Evason felt “they’re not overturning that.”

Of course, with the way the Wild have trouble scoring, it sure seemed like a “what do you have to lose?” moment from a coach who has made more peculiar challenge decisions in the past.

Regardless, a 3-1 deficit as opposed to 3-2 heading into the third seemed like a mountain for the porous offensive team.

The GREEF Line had a couple of golden scoring chances in the first period, but it’s not been a good season production-wise from Foligno and Greenway. They’ve combined for six goals. The line was particularly careless in the second period when it followed the pattern of so many other teammates by not getting pucks in. The Wild kept turning pucks over in the first half of the game all over the ice.

“It’s guys like me that need to get ourselves going,” said Foligno, who scored 23 goals last season but has just four this season. “It’s frustrating as a checking line to not produce. I just think we need, myself and just a few others that have chipped in before, to get going.”

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The Wild were without stalwart defenseman Jonas Brodin, who has a lower-body injury and is questionable to play Thursday, too. Alex Goligoski, who has been scratched 30 times this season and in 18 of the previous 25 games, played.

Evason also tweaked the lines by putting Hartman, who had 33 even-strength goals last season, back between Kirill Kaprizov and Zuccarello. Sam Steel centered Matt Boldy and Freddy Gaudreau with the hope of getting Boldy going, but that line was by far the Wild’s worst. Steel was soft on pucks and turning pucks over, Gaudreau got on the wrong side of pucks and turned pucks over and Boldy was scoreless on three shots and four more attempted and lost several board battles.

“We want to score goals and we tried to generate opportunities tonight,” Middleton said. “And we did a good job of that. We just didn’t finish and lost another two points. … There was a big belief for us in that second intermission that we kind of have momentum going into the third. Again, it just goes back to we didn’t finish. We haven’t been scoring and that’s got to change. That’s on us. There’s no if, ands or buts about it. It’s just on us as players. We’ve got to bear down and finish.”

The Wild are 13-3 in their past 16 at home, but they can’t just rest on their laurels of being in a friendly confine. They are not playing well of late, and to Rupp’s point, they’re barely beating very beatable teams at home. And on this homestand, they face a murderers’ row of competition that includes Dallas again, Colorado, New Jersey, Florida and Los Angeles.

The Wild are only in a playoff spot because they have a game in hand on Calgary. This season is going sideways quickly, which is why that locker room door stayed closed longer than usual after Wednesday’s latest loss.

“You know what, we’ve got such a tight-knit crew,” defenseman Matt Dumba said. “We understand the magnitude of it. Every team’s gotta go through it to be successful, and this is just a bump along the road. We’ve gotta bunch of character guys in here and I know we’ll come out of this stronger.”

Added Foligno, “It wasn’t a yelling meeting but understanding what’s at stake here. We gotta get some wins going. It’s not like we’re trying to put pressure on ourselves and stuff like that. There’s pressure already there. It’s more just about being an accountable group and just understanding that this is a homestand that we have on the schedule coming up that we really need to take advantage of.

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“We’re still there, we just gotta get going. We don’t want to wait until there’s a bigger wake-up call. The wake-up call’s now, and we just need to start winning.”

(Photo: Jerome Miron / USA Today)