Considering Brent Burns got hurt in warmups and the Wild lost Tomas Mojzis got hurt two shifts in when he took a slap shot to the body and Marian Gaborik and Owen Nolan were nursing wounds back in Minnesota, pretty gutsy victory tonight from the Wild.

Benoit Pouliot, Mikko Koivu and Eric Belanger got the goals, and Belanger was superb all night.

Koivu won 16 of 24 draws and scored a goal on eight shots.

The Burns injury — everybody is hush-hush on — but he’s expected to play Tuesday in San Jose. Burns was on the original lineup and Tomas Mojzis was a scratch.

Prior to the puck drop, Lemaire had to frantically call the referee over to change it and inform the Coyotes, or the Wild would have been in deep trouble. He told the ref that Mojzis would be there in a few minutes. So since Mojzis wasn’t in warmups, he wasn’t even on the bench when the game started. I don’t know if I’ve ever covered such a bizarre situation.

And then to top it off, Mojzis gets hurt.

Par for the course with this team right now.

I was really impressed with the play of defenseman Erik Reitz, who filled in well in 11-plus minutes. He was physical and safe.

Pouliot did a solid job, and I’ll let you read the gamer for Jacques’ funny quote on him.

It was a pretty entertaining game. There was one insane shift where the Wild got trapped in its own zone for almost three minutes in the second period — the zone furthest from the bench — thanks to two icings. Look at the time on ice chart on nhl.com, but you’ll see Schultz, Johnsson and Belanger played 2 1/2 minutes. You should have seen their heavy legs when they finally were able to make their way to the bench.

Niklas Backstrom was solid, making 25 saves and improving to 7-0 against the Coyotes. It was the Wild’s eighth straight win over Phoenix and fourth in a row here.

To go with that Gillies, Turris story from the previous blog and my notebook in the paper, Gillies assisted on Koivu’s goal.

Funny moment during the game. The Jumbotron was doing its version of the kissing contest with the background music of Hot Chocalate’s “You Sexy Thing.” They showed Stephane Veilleux and James Sheppard on the screen, and the crowd roared when Veilleux gave Sheppard a peck on the helmet.

OK, that’s it for now. Another early flight in the morning to Northern California, so I won’t complain about this one. Just an fyi, I would not be shocked at all if Jacques cancels practice tomorrow to give this running on empty team a much-needed rest. There are two days in between the game against San Jose, and the Wild hasn’t had a day off in like two weeks.

So you might not see much on the blog until there’s an injury report provided by the team. Mojzis will be evaluated tomorrow. Burns is expected to play. And Owen Nolan isn’t being evaluated until Monday anyway.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 12:17 am 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.