Niklas Backstrom stopped 46 of 48 shots tonight to improve to 6-0 lifetime against Phoenix with a .963 save percentage.

He was tremendous at times, although coach Jacques Lemaire, Backstrom and his teammates talked postgame about how “stingy” it was defensively.

No question the Wild kept several shots to the outside and no question its forward’s back pressure was outstanding, but Backstrom was pretty doggone good, too.

For the eighth time this season, the Wild scored two or more power-play goals — tonight three by Eric Belanger, Mark Parrish and Brian Rolston.

Belanger had three points. Brent Burns had two assists.

Parrish’s power-play breakaway was a pretty sweet move as he showed that even though he hasn’t scored since before Wes Walz retired, he didn’t forget how to be a goal scorer.

In fact, all three goals had one common denominator — Parrish at the front of the net.

Ilya Bryzgalov was cheating toward him on Belanger’s bad-angle first-period goal and Rolston’s winner came on a deflected shot by Parrish’s traffic.

I’ll take credit. I gave him a pep talk this morning. Just a joke. But I did interview him ad nauseum about his slump, and he made me pay. I had to rework my notebook lead three times.

Overall, it was a good bounceback after last night’s 8-3 trouncing in Dallas. The Wild had a 30-minute meeting this morning in which coach Jacques Lemaire used example clips of Dominic Moore, Branko Radivojevic and Stephane Veilleux’s hard work and compared them to other lines.

It was a tough, honest meeting, but it’ll take more than one game to see if the message got through.

The blog controls belong to Kent Youngblood probably for the rest of the year (calendar year, that is) as I’m taking a little time off the next few days/games.

Mikko Koivu skated for 40 minutes on his own yesterday, by the way.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 3:01 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.