I honestly don’t even know where to begin. The Wild gave up eight goals for the second time in team history tonight.

Six of its last eight losses are by three or more goals. This is a team that usually, even when it’s lost, keeps it close and competitive.

But suddenly the Wild is routinely getting humiliated when it loses and other than Mikko Koivu, it’s completely healthy. It’s 2-8 now on the road against the top-eight in the West.

I don’t know how many more signs there could be that this team is just not good enough.

And the fact it had to fly to Dallas this morning (boo-hoo) should be no excuse.

The easy thing would also be to allow the Wild to sit there and pretend it was really in a 4-3 hockey game in the third period and then suddenly when Brenden Morrow and Mike Modano scored 14 seconds apart (tied Wild road record for fastest two goals surrendered), it simply ran out of gas.

That would be the easy thing, but the Wild was a chaotic mess all night — in all three zones.

Ridiculous line changes, baffling turnovers, stepping up and hitting people only to fall to the ice, just slipping and falling.

What’s more, you’d think when Pavol Demitra’s scoring from the stands on two occasions, the Wild would just shoot on a shaky-to-say-the-least Marty Turco. But it astonishingly managed 17 shots (tied for a season low).

That’s 58 shots the last three games everybody.

Marian Gaborik, whom I think is the same guy who scored five a few games back, was awful for the second game in a row. Jacques slammed him without naming names, condemning him by saying, “When you have to put a guy on the penalty kill to make him work, there’s a problem. Because if he doesn’t work, it’s going to be in the net.”

Well, Gaborik doesn’t play the penalty kill normally and played 2:03 tonight. He was a minus-3 by 9:33 in. I think he was talking about Gaborik. Just a guess.

As for Dallas, 14 players had at least a point. Morrow and Mike Ribeiro had three apiece. Modano, Jeff Halpern, Antti Miettinen and Steve Ott had two apiece.

Former UMD standout and Virginia High School defenseman Matt Niskanen assisted on Nik Hagman’s first goal and was a plus-3. This kid’s good, and he’s only 21.

Amazingly, his partner, Sergei Zubov didn’t have a point in an eight-goal game. Well, the stirling defenseman is quiet and unassuming, but that’s incredible.

Josh Harding gave up all eight, but he didn’t pull a Patrick Roy after. In fact, he was pretty darn good. The Wild could have given up a baker’s dozen if Harding hadn’t been on his game during certain stretches.

THAT’S HOW DREADFUL THEY WERE!

Point made. Good night. Talk to ya from Glendale, Arizona.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Game coverage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.