Minnesota Wild vs. St.-Louis Blues: Game Recap

For the enemy perspective, please visit St. Louis Game Time

We meet again. Would tonight be a déjà vu of saturday's dreadful 6-3 loss to the Blues? Would the Wild play like a team possessed after the last game brought about a lengthy team meeting following the 8th straight loss?

D'Agostini's penalty carried into overtime and we got to see a rare specimen: the OT 5-on-3. This was caused by a tripping penalty on Vladimir Sobotka. This is so rare that the T.V. announcers thought the 2 minutes would only start after the 12 seconds left on D'Agostini's penalty expired when it is in fact a 5-on-3 situation that turns into a 5-on-4 until the next whistle. It wouldn't really make sense to give a 2:12 penalty to a player, would it? The Wild used those powerplay minutes to pepper Jaro Halak with shots, but they harvested nothing for their efforts. The shots per period for the Wild went like this: 9-5-6-8. So in five minutes, they shot almost as many as any 20 minute period.

Game notes:

While the Wild went winless in Willy Wonka's Wacky..er, in the first 6 games since Koivu's return 7 games ago, the Kaptain has contributed 8 points out of 14 Wild goals in those 7 games, and he got tonight's shootout winner. Oh Kaptain, my Kaptain.

 I said the Wild's 8 game winless streak was it's least pointful because the longest losing streak was nine, but they had gotten three points out of it. This losing streak gave the Wild one point and had their worst loss in franchise history (against my hated Habs... rage.) smack-dab in the middle of it.

Bouchard's unassissted marker was his 299th career point.

Hockey Wilderness 3 stars:

1) Chris Stewart (2 goals, made a whole lot of Avalanche fans feel sad and wistful)

2) Pierre-Marc Bouchard ( Tying goal + goal in the shootout)

3) Eric Nystrom (goal, lots of Sorry Tom, 16:13 TOI)

5 questions:

1. Does Casey Wellman offer a boost? I wish he would've been given at least a chance to.

3. Can Jose Theodore pull them team out of the funk? He did a good job, but seemed kind of shaky tonight. A W's a W, I suppose!

4. Over / Under for shots against is set at 35. What you got? 28 after 60 minutes, they added one in the extra frame. The Wild were still outshot by one shot though.

5. Does anyone really care where Oshie was? For all I care, he could've been climbing Mount Everest, as long as he wasn't playing tonight, I was fine with it.