\u201cThere is a pride to it,\u201d\u00a0Tarasenko said. \u201cEspecially after last year, there\u2019s a lot of things going on.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cJust try to work hard, earn my spot.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
His 23 goals this season are tied with Ryan Hartman for third-most on the Wild, behind 40-goal scorers Kirill Kaprizov and Matt Boldy.<\/p>\n
Tarasenko scored 11 goals and 33 points with Detroit last season after signing a two-year deal with the Red Wings in the summer of 2024. The Wild acquired him in a trade on June 30, 2025.\u00a0<\/p>\n
After getting drafted in the first round and spending the first decade of his career with St. Louis, Tarasenko landed in Minnesota with his sixth team in four seasons, since the Blues traded him to the New York Rangers in 2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI enjoy being at the rink,\u201d Tarasenko said. \u201cI enjoy the guys. It\u2019s awesome to be with the guys. Very good people, and it\u2019s nice to be around.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Tarasenko got off to a slow start in scoring goals this season, with just two in his first 18 games before missing seven games with a lower-body injury in the second half of November. But he turned things around and showed shades of his best offensive production.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He had a season-high, four-game point streak (5-3=8) in mid-January, including back-to-back multi-goal games in Toronto and Montreal. Three of those four goals came on the power play. He had a similarly productive surge a couple of months later in March, not long before his 900th career NHL game.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He scored seven goals and 11 points in the final 15 games of the season starting March 15, recording at least a point in nine of those games.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He acknowledged that confidence was one of the changes with his game down the stretch, but the work is never done, even during a successful scoring run.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIf it goes well, you need to keep working,\u201d Tarasenko said. \u201cIf it doesn\u2019t go well, you still need to keep working and trust the process and trust myself.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThere is a pride to it,\u201d\u00a0Tarasenko said. \u201cEspecially after last year, there\u2019s a lot of things going on.\u00a0…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":614947,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-614946","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\/614946","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=614946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614946\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/614947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=614946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=614946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=614946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}