By Jamie MacDonald
FOXSportsNorth.com
January 9, 2011
Every once in a while, a team playing in the second half of a back-to-back will come out energized from the momentum of the night before.
Sunday's 4-0 loss to the Dallas Stars was not one of those days for the Wild.
Coming off three straight games on the East Coast, the third of which started in Pittsburgh less than 24 hours before the drop of the puck on Sunday, Minnesota lacked the requisite "jump" it needed to play one of the top teams in the Western Conference.
"They're a very, very good team -- big and they can skate," Todd Richards said of the Stars. "But we just didn't have the step we needed to have tonight. I thought we battled, I thought we played hard. But, again, [we] lacked that step that we needed to have to play against a very good team."
Game No. 42, which dropped Minnesota to 1-6-3 in the back end of back-to-back games, will go into the books as a shutout loss, and the Wild will turn the page in hopes the rest of their second half looks a little less like Sunday.
TURNING POINT
In truth, the game was more of a long slog through 60 minutes, with Minnesota coming up just short here and there on puck battles and chances in the offensive end, but the second goal did sting.
Dallas took an early lead on the Wild's third shift of the game when Pierre-Marc Bouchard's stick check wasn't enough to keep Trevor Daley from scoring at 2:33 of the first, but Minnesota seemed headed to the break down only 1-0.
And then Jamie Benn took a puck from one end to the other, froze Cam Barker with a move before walking around him, then roofed a short-side shot over Jose Theodore's glove at 19:11 for a 2-0 lead.
It was the only play of the game that seemed to happen out of nowhere, and while a two-goal lead isn't the most dangerous in hockey, Dallas made it stand up.
LATE PUSH
Though the score suggests a runaway, the Wild did try to make a move as they neared the middle minutes of the third period.
Brent Burns, who seemed to do very little wrong on Sunday, set Martin Havlat up for a one-time redirect in front of Andrew Raycroft at 5:51 of the period. About a minute later, Cal Clutterbuck leveled Stephane Robidas in the corner to Raycroft's right. In the other end, over the next 30 seconds, Jose Theodore twice robbed Benn with glove saves and Clutterbuck landed another hit on Nicklas Grossman.
The crowed found a rhythm in response.
By the time Marco Scandella landed a puck on Raycroft at 8:23, the 18,082 had been shaken from the doldrums, and the momentum shift forced a Dallas timeout at 8:35.
Nick Schultz took the game's next shot, but the Stars managed to turn things around and score the game's next goal at 9:52.
James Neal wheeled around in traffic and fired what a Dallas announcer referred to as a "fadeaway wrister" that hit Theodore. The puck squirted through the goaltender, and it crossed the goal line as he waved at it with his stick. At 14:28, Benn cemented things with his second of the game for a 4-0 lead.
LOSING PROPOSITION
A team can't win 82 games, and this one, coming off the road trip and running into a well-rested and very good opponent did not set up well.
