By Tony Abbott -
"There's not a lot of money in revenge." - Inigo Montoya
"Revenge is like serving cold cuts." - Tony Soprano
The Minnesota Wild seemingly went onto the ice with one thing on their minds on Saturday night, and it didn't much involve winning a hockey game.
Earlier this week, the Wild made it clear that they had the game against the Nashville Predators circled on their calendar since Zachary L'Heureux slew-footed Jared Spurgeon on New Year's Eve, keeping the captain out ever since.
"They've got a lot of guys on Nashville who understand the code, and the young kid doesn't understand. It's frustrating," Marcus Foligno, often the Wild's de facto enforcer, told The Athletic on January 14. "There will be a price to pay for that game. I'm sure he'll have to answer to someone."
It feels like the Wild worked to walk that back a touch over the coming days.
"We gotta be smart," Foligno said on Friday. "We can't be worried about that player specifically. I’m sure if something will get done or when he’s out there, you just play hard against him. But we gotta focus on winning the game and beating Nashville."
John Hynes echoed that later sentiment: "That’s not where our mind needs to be. Our mind needs to be on playing hockey and finding a way to win the game. That’s the most important thing.”
Look at the game last night, and you tell me where the focus was.
As expected, L'Heureux had to answer the bell on his first shift of the game, squaring off with Yakov Trenin. Foligno fought heavyweight Luke Schenn, who was uninvolved with the Spurgeon slew-foot, on the ensuing faceoff. Revenge? Check.
But the Wild found out what Inigo Montoya realized over decades of training his mind and body for vengeance in The Princess Bride.
There's no money in that game.
While David Jiricek and the Wild drew first blood on the scoresheet, the Wild went down shockingly easily to the seventh-place Predators.
This just isn't the kind of game the Wild drop -- at least, not this year and not under John Hynes. Minnesota entered Saturday night with an NHL-best 16 road wins. Now 16-5-3 away from the confines of the Xcel Energy Center, the Wild have earned a lot of attention and praise for their efficient, business-minded approach when traveling.
Credit to Minnesota, they didn't get caught up in a march to the penalty box. After a three-fight first period, the Wild were only shorthanded once. But the emotion of the game seemed to get poured into avenging Spurgeon. After that, it didn't look like there was much left in the tank.
The team was uncharacteristically sloppy, a massive departure from its high standard of defensive play. The Predators got shots in from in-close all night, and the Wild defense didn't have any answers for the likes of Filip Forsberg, who notched two goals and eight shots on the night.
“It was a good start, but then we didn’t sustain kind of how we started the game,” Hynes admitted after the loss. “And then I think there was just a multitude of areas of our game that wasn’t good to me.”
Trenin put his finger on why: The Predators didn't have any skin in the revenge business.
"They switched to hockey quicker than we did and scored," the physical former Predator said. "It took us some time to switch [to] it."
We're all human, and emotions are part of the game. But so is managing them. At the end of the night, fighting L'Heureux didn't speed up Spurgeon's timetable. Having to answer to Trenin didn't even deliver the intended message. L'Heureux almost delivered a headshot to Wild top center Marco Rossi, which the team's third-leading scorer mercifully avoided.
The Wild's response cost Nashville nothing, and it was never going to hit the Predators where it hurts. As much as the team and fans want a cathartic title fight in revenge for injuring a top player, that's not the kind of league this is anymore. Despite the Wild's dalliances with enforcers like Nic Deslauriers and Ryan Reaves, The Code has never protected the team and never been a deterrent. Again, that's not the case anywhere.
The Wild dipped their toes back into the Old School pool and immediately learned why it didn't work under Dean Evason. Minnesota still plays hard under Hynes, but that effort is focused, controlled, and directed toward defense, not physicality for its own sake. For the sake of sticking to what's worked, the Wild are better to let their urge for revenge out of their system now and avoid having to flip the switch from vengeance to hockey in the future.
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