Steve Kelly is out indefinitely with an injury to his left ankle.

Benoit Pouliot has a flight scheduled for Friday morning and is due into Minnesota by the team’s noon practice.

Wild moved from seventh to sixth in the West. Colorado beat Edmonton, 5-1, to move into first in the division with 84 points. The Wild is sixth in the conference with 82 points, moving ahead of Calgary, which also has 82, because the Wild has one more win.

Calgary blew a 2-0 lead in Atlanta to lose 6-4.

The best news if you’re a Wild fan is that the Los Angeles Spoilers beat Nashville, 4-1, so the Preds stay in ninth with 78 points. Those potential-Spoilers come into the X Saturday night.

Vancouver stays in eighth with 80 points after losing to Phoenix. Wild, Calgary and Vancouver have a game in hand on Nashville and Colorado. Tenth-place Phoenix has 77 points and I’d be worried about them more than Nashville.
Eight of the Wild’s last 11 games are against playoff teams, and the Wild hasn’t beaten a playoff team in a month or a playoff team at home in 6 weeks.

Wild sustained its third straight shootout loss and fifth straight overall, and guess what? They talked on and on and on and on and … about how many chances they had.

It’s a broken record every game. Just bad bounces and bad luck and great goaltending. That’s all well and good for Game 20. But the Wild hasn’t beaten a playoff team at home since Jan. 30. It’s scored three or fewer for 12 straight games. It’s looking like it will back into the playoffs if it makes the playoffs (the Canucks are on pace for 92.4 points. If that pace continues, the Wild would need 11 more points to get to 93. I still think it’ll take 95) .

At some point the positivity’s going to wear off because at some point frustration’s going to set in. You can’t keep outplaying opponents (at least in their own mind) and not getting victories game after game after game.

There’s no doubt the Wild outplayed the Devils. There’s no doubt Martin Brodeur was sensational. There’s no doubt that pucks amazingly trickle wide more against this team than any team I’ve ever covered. And there’s no doubt, as Mikko Koivu said, “there wasn’t anything you could do differently” about the goals against.

But for the umpteenth time during this five-game losing streak and nine-loss-out-of-12-game stretch, the Wild only proves it can’t finish.

Sorry, but that’s a fact. If bad luck and bad bounces really do even out over the course of time like the hockey cliche goes, it’ll take the Wild winning the Cup.

And besides the lack of finish, the Wild consistently blows leads. Tonight it was a two-goal second-period lead and one-goal third-period lead.

As Jacques Lemaire says, they start to play differently. Jacques pointed out one example, and I also saw this a number of times in the second period.

The Wild would be pinned in its own zone for several scrambly seconds. The two wingers would be dead tired and would want to do anything humanly possible to just get that puck out so they could go off for a change. But then, the Wild would finally get the puck out, and those two same, dead-tired wingers would try to spring offensively.

Honestly, what are you doing? Not bright.

Other tidbits:

– Wild is 3-6 in shootouts after being 10-7 last year.

– Trade-deadline pickup Chris Simon played 5 1/2 minutes, and Aaron Voros was in the press box.

–Bouchard played a career-high 23:19 and got his 46th assist, two off Andrew Brunette’s team record.

– Marian Gaborik scored his second goal in 11 games and 199th in his career.

– Stephane Veilleux was a ball of energy and scored his third goal in seven games.

– Brent Burns made a defensive boo-boo for the tying goal in the second, but had one and one on seven shots.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 11:38 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.