Hynes is in charge of sending that message and helping the Wild follow through on it against the Stars, who finished the season ahead of Minnesota in second place in the Central Division.<\/p>\n
He talked about how the Wild got to this point, and what they’re up against in the following Q&A with NHL.com:<\/p>\n
You’ve known for a long time that this series was likely going to happen against the Stars, and that’s not normal to have that knowledge for as long as you have had it. How has that impacted you and the team knowing for quite a while that this scenario was going to play out, that your first-round opponent was pretty much locked in a month ago, if not longer?<\/p>\n
“Yeah, it has been. I think it was on that track for a while. Part of it was having an idea on that, that we were going to be in and it was most likely going to be Dallas, but we basically went through a little bit of a stretch in March where we were playing OK, like mid-to-late March. We would have a couple good games, but we weren’t clicking on all cylinders. In many ways it was like a lull. Then we had a four-day break where the guys had two days off and we had an opportunity to have two good practice days before we went into our last stretch, which began April 1. We played Vancouver, Ottawa and Detroit back to back, Seattle at home and then Dallas. Before the break I had talked to the guys about it, saying basically that we were just playing these games, that we need urgency, that we have to make sure individually you’re getting to your game and we’re feeling good about that, and collectively the style of game that we need to play, we need to see that, we need to hit that. So, when we come back be ready for practice, but April 1, it’s go-time. We structured the practice around some identity drills and things we wanted to do. I think the guys came back and they were hungry to practice. We had two good practice days and then we played five really good games. Our top guys played really well. Our style of game was very good. That was our focus and I’m glad that we were able to do that and hit that game and get individual games going well. Then it was a little bit of a preliminary feel of what it’s going to be like playing in Dallas (5-4 loss on April 9<\/a>). An emotional game, both teams played hard. It was almost like getting reacquainted to the atmosphere, to the team, to what it’s going to go through.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hynes is in charge of sending that message and helping the Wild follow through on it against the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":610853,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-610852","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610852\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/610853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}