Forgot to mention, I’ll be on KSTP tonight at 7 CT 

Good afternoon from Los Angeles, where the Wild visits the Kings tonight at the STAPLES Center.

Don’t mean to be a broken record, but if you’re not following me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/russostrib, today’s a good example as to why you should.

Whether it was the fault of the vast cement of the Staples Center or the dude with the glasses in all those Verizon commercials, I couldn’t get into my blog admin on the usually-reliable Blackberry. I was able to tweet, however. So if you follow me on Twitter, you learned 90 minutes ago or so that Josh Harding will start tonight’s game against Terry Murray’s Kings.

This is the first example as to Harding getting not only more starts but more normal starts than previous years. In the past, you could all but predict when Harding would start — the second of a back-to-back, or to be blunt, the games in which Jacques Lemaire figured the Wild probably wouldn’t win anyway (my opinion, and an opinion shared by a few people who have been retained from the previous regime).

But tonight, Harding gets a game that Niklas Backstrom would have started in the past.

Todd Richards said he wants to quality, reliable goalies, and the only way to get that is to not sit the No. 2 for three weeks in a row. So Harding will be spotted in a lot more than he has in the past.

I did warn Mr. Richards that any and all fantasy questions regarding “who’s starting tonight in goal because I’m a big, big Wild fan and I just have to know” will be forwarded directly to his email. Like I was born yesterday. Man, did I get a lot of those in the Dwayne Roloson-Manny Fernandez shared net era, and it always irritated me (so advance warning here, folks, if you dare send that email).

But, it sounds like Richards will be a lot more honest about who’s starting games, so “at least you can get it on your blog and Twitter in time for people to adjust their fantasy teams,” Richards said. Sounds like a man who plays some fantasy, eh?

Between you and me and not anybody else, I actually don’t need honesty. I’ve learned since my early years covering this team how to tell by the skate who’s starting in goal, and if you follow me on Twitter, I let you know that secret this morning.

Really, not that much else going on. Obviously, no other lineup changed because only extra is Jaime Sifers.

Richards was pretty critical of Benoit Pouliot’s late third-period penalty the other night, a careless goalie interference penalty that evened up a power play that Pouliot himself had done a good job drawing. Richards basically said Pouliot can’t do things like that again if he wants more than the five minutes he got against the Duckies.

Also, I talked to Richards a lot about the system today. I asked specifically about the three turnovers by Eric Belanger in the first period in his own slot and the one by Antti Miettinen. Belanger is usually very responsible in his own end, so it got me thinking on the four-hour planeride yesterday thanks to massive headwinds, was this more like a wide receiver missing his route and the quarterback looking stupid? In other words, is the Wild breakout supposed to have a teammate in that slot for Belanger/Miettinen to pass to? Turns out, Richards say, yes and no.

“No. 1, it’s players decisions,” Richards said. “But that is an area of the ice that we’ve talked about that we need to use on breakouts. It’s just understanding when we can use that area of the ice. What you’re talking about, I think, 1) [Belanger] was really tired and it’s funny when you get tired how the brain shuts off and you make bad decisions. But as a team, we’ve talked about using that area of the ice and we want to use that area of the ice. It’s just we have to make the right choices. I don’t like making backhand plays into the middle of the ice, and Miettinen tried to make that play as well in the first period and he knew it as soon as he made the pass that it wasn’t the right play. And I think Eric Belanger knew that, too. But, that’s something as a coach, we’ll show videotape on that. ‘We’ve talked about using the middle, but this right now is not a good time to use the middle.’

“Sometimes it can be a blind play to the middle if your teammates are talking. But if you’re making plays in the ice, you’ve got to be 100 percent sure at that point.”

So, in finality, this is a very risky part of the Wild’s system with the goal to create speed on the breakout. If it works, it should work. If the Wild does what it did in the first period the other night and consistently cough it up, I promise, there won’t be many scoreless first periods in the future. The Wild was very lucky in the first period the other night that Backstrom was good and that the Ducks were in la-la land because Anaheim had five or six incredible scoring-chance opportunities that amounted to squat.

By the way, Richards on what was said in the second intermission the other night: “I do get emotional, but I don’t lose control. I just asked questions. The guys did all the talking. And they were the ones that kind of put it in simple terms of what we were doing wrong and what we should be doing. It wasn’t me.”

OK, talk to you before tonight’s game.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.