The Wild Are Wile E. Coyote Suspended In Midair

As a kid, I loved Saturday morning cartoons, especially Looney Tunes. Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner had a fun cat-and-mouse dynamic that matched anything you’d see on Tom and Jerry. 

Wile E. Coyote would set traps for the Road Runner, often using more dynamite than you’d find in a Wisconsin warehouse. However, he was also clever. Sometimes, he’d paint a fake tunnel on the side of a mountain that the Road Runner would run into.

However, Wile E. Coyote never caught the Road Runner. He doesn’t have the wheels or the brakes. Sometimes, he builds so much momentum that he flies off a cliff and suspends himself in midair. 

Still, Wile E. Coyote only falls into the chasm after he realizes what he’s done.

After Game 3, the Minnesota Wild are Wile E. Coyote. After losing Game 1, they shocked the Vegas Golden Knights 5-2 on the road, and followed up that win with a 5-2 victory in St. Paul.

They are suspended in midair. Hopefully, they don’t realize it until they reach the other side.

The Wild walked on thin ice throughout Game 2. Minnesota withstood the Vegas Golden Knights’ initial fusillade and scored three goals on 30% of their shots. Then, they hunkered down while Vegas surged, trying to come back in the game. The Knights scored twice, but Kirill Kaprizov’s long empty-netter sealed it.

Minnesota followed a similar blueprint in Game 3. They took a 2-0 lead on Kirill Kaprizov and Marco Rossi’s early goals. Alex Pietrangelo scored a fluky goal to cut the lead in half going into the first intermission. The Wild scored two more in the second period before giving up a short-handed goal and hanging on to win on Marcus Foligno’s empty-netter.

Nobody believed Minnesota would win the series except for its most optimistic fans. The sportsbooks favored the Knights (-235); Moneypuck gave them a 32.6% chance to take it. Only one ESPN analyst picked the Wild in the series.

The Wild scored on 30% of their shots when they took their 3-0 lead in Game 2. The sportsbooks still favored Vegas in Game 3. Kaprizov is playing like a superstar, and Boldy has taken his game to another level. Depth players like Foligno and Ryan Hartman are playing the way they must play to steal this series.

Win Game 4 in St. Paul, and the Wild are on the brink of reaching the second round for the first time since 2014-15. In 2016-17 and 2017-18, Minnesota was a 100-point team that lost in five games to the St. Louis Blues and Winnipeg Jets. They were the Roadrunner. 

They saw a pathway that wasn’t there and ran into a boulder.

However, the Wild have been more like Wile E. Coyote since Guerin took over in 2019.

After flying off the cliff, Wile E. Coyote is fine until he realizes he’s hovering above a chasm. Without self-reflection, Wile E. Coyote probably would make it over. However, he stops as soon as he thinks about his situation and immediately falls.

The Wild have been up 2-1 in a series recently. 

They were up 2-1 on the Blues in 2021-22, but Craig Berube made adjustments and out-coached Dean Evason for the rest of the series. St. Louis won the next three games, ending Minnesota’s season.

A year later, they were up 2-1 on the Dallas Stars. However, Peter DeBoer had beaten them with the Golden Knights in 2020-21 and used their lack of discipline against them. Foligno and the Wild lost their composure, and they also lost that series 4-2.

It feels different this time, though. Kaprizov and Boldy have broken through. Minnesota’s glue guys are holding the team together, and Filip Gustavsson hasn’t looked fatigued after playing 58 games.

Like Wile E. Coyote, the Wild are suspended in the air. The chasm of years of playoff failure sits beneath them. Still, they can’t think about it. They must embrace being somewhere they probably don’t belong, hoping they have enough momentum to get to the other side.