4-3 season-ending loss<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u201cIt\u2019s just empty,\u201d Mats Zuccarello said.<\/p>\n
\u201cShock,\u201d Marcus Foligno said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnger and frustration,\u201d Brock Faber said. \u201cYou work all year for one thing, and just feels like it closes like that, and it\u2019s just done, it sucks.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Wild would have been underdogs to beat the league\u2019s best team even with Joel Eriksson Ek and Jonas Brodin, who both missed the series with injuries. The trickle-down effect was too much to recover from. The Wild\u2019s penalty kill, without them, stunk. Their power play, without Eriksson Ek at the net-front, was awful. With Ryan Hartman already miscast as the No. 1 center, young Danila Yurov wasn\u2019t ready to be No. 2, and it\u2019s ridiculous in a must-win game that they had no other option but to play Michael McCarron in that role.<\/p>\n
On the blue line in Brodin\u2019s spot, Jake Middleton, for the second postseason in a row, was beyond overmatched, on the ice for 13 goals against, including the tying and losing goals Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Still, to see this team crumble into smithereens after playing so well in the first 20 minutes is the type of thing that can get a coach fired, even with the built-in excuse of no Eriksson Ek and Brodin.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think our guys competed hard,\u201d coach John Hynes said, avoiding the opening question of the news conference on what the heck happened. \u201cThis group is a pleasure to coach. You go nine months together, basically, right? And great competitors, great character, gave everything they had. And that\u2019s all you can ask as a coach.\u201d<\/p>\n
You can also ask them not to blow a three-goal lead for the first time in Wild playoff history. And maybe to try to skate the puck over the red line once or twice in the second half of the game.<\/p>\n
As Faber said so honestly after, the Avalanche deserved to win this series.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t really hide or dance around the fact that they outplayed us, but \u2026 that\u2019s where the frustration comes in,\u201d Faber said. \u201cI feel like when we are at our best, we can beat that team. We just didn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of the Wild\u2019s popular phrases in this series was, \u201cOur best is good enough.\u201d We saw that in a dominant Game 3 victory that served mostly as a tantalizing tease of what could have been.<\/p>\n
But you can\u2019t play four or five good periods in a series and expect to win, especially against the class of the NHL. The Avalanche looked and felt every bit like a Stanley Cup champion \u2014 a blend of resilient and relentless.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t just Nathan MacKinnon, who scored in every game of the series, dominating. It was players like Ross Colton and Parker Kelly and Jack Drury.<\/p>\n
The Wild know the Avalanche are the best team in the league when it comes to tips, yet they couldn\u2019t keep them from the middle of the offensive zone and gave up two more deflected goals Wednesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey get a lot of bodies in there,\u201d goalie Jesper Wallstedt said. \u201cThat makes it a hard job for me with screens and traffic. It\u2019s hard for goalies to save (tips). They got to the areas where they had to get to, and they got rewarded for it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Wild, a presumed Cup contender for the first time, acted like pretenders. It showed in their inexplicable faceplant in Game 4 at home, when they had what Foligno called a \u201cbrain fog\u201d and got arrogant and didn\u2019t play their game. And it ended with this epic collapse in Game 5, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.<\/p>\n
They had the Avalanche right where they wanted them, then let them rip their hearts out.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery one of us had a strong belief that we were going to bring this back to St. Paul,\u201d Wallstedt said. \u201cEveryone gave it (their) all out there. Felt like we really, really had an effort that could win us a game, but today it just wasn\u2019t enough.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Wild needed their best players to be better. There\u2019s no hiding from that.<\/p>\n
Where was the Matt Boldy who was such a clutch game-breaker in the first round against the Dallas Stars? He had just one goal in five games, an empty-netter. In the last minute of regulation, he looked panicked as he fumbled the puck left and right. In the first few seconds of overtime, he made a poor pass to McCarron on a two-on-one. Later in overtime, seconds before the game ended, he couldn\u2019t catch Kirill Kaprizov\u2019s pass for a one-timer.<\/p>\n
Where the heck was Kaprizov, the guy who held the Wild hostage before the season in contract talks and in six weeks will cash an $18.1 million signing bonus check \u2014 the first in his brand new $17 million-per-year deal, the richest in NHL history? He showed some life in a dominant Game 3 in buoying that win. But in the Game 4 flop, he had one measly shot on goal. In the must-win Game 5? Zero, including not shooting and instead passing to Boldy seconds before Colorado came down and ended Minnesota\u2019s season.<\/p>\n
Hynes dodged a question about Kaprizov after the game. And Kaprizov got visibly and audibly angry when asked about his pass to Boldy and having no shots.<\/p>\n
Kaprizov and Boldy could have been heroes if that pass had connected. Instead, Boldy whiffed and, seconds later, Brett Kulak \u2014 of all players \u2014 put the dagger in Minnesota\u2019s season after Martin Ne\u010das came through in the clutch with a tremendous setup.<\/p>\n
This loss stings far more than the others, particularly because the Wild raised their own expectations. They finally won a first-round series for the first time in a decade, but desperately wanted more. And a path was there, especially with either the Anaheim Ducks or Vegas Golden Knights waiting in the next round.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou get through these guys, you never know,\u201d Quinn Hughes said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou get past Colorado, and you\u2019ve got a shot,\u201d Foligno echoed.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what will probably haunt this group for a long time. This is the most talented collection of Wild players in team history, and their core isn\u2019t getting any younger. They\u2019ve got Hughes, one of the game\u2019s premier defensemen, for just one more season, unless he signs an extension, which he can starting this summer.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s a little early to be thinking that way,\u201d Hughes said. \u201cObviously, just disappointed right now and proud of everyone in how we competed and battled and just leave it at that.\u201d<\/p>\n
At some point, the Wild have to break through. But Wednesday night, they were handed a harsh lesson from a true contender \u2014 one that smelled blood against a team that cowered and played scared to death from the 20-minute mark on.<\/p>\n
\u201c(We) took a step, for sure. I don\u2019t think anyone can deny that,\u201d Boldy said. \u201cBut I think we can start to realize what we are capable of \u2014 the type of team we are. How good we are. The core we have. We\u2019re capable of so much.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the positive thing. So the sooner that we can realize that and act like that and play our game like that, the better off we\u2019re going to be. Unfortunately, you\u2019ve got to learn how to lose to learn how to win. That team over there has done that. They\u2019ve gone through ups and downs. They\u2019ve learned how to lose and learned how to win, and I think that\u2019s what we have to do. We have to use this experience to benefit us and start to realize that with the group we have that this is a great chance for us to take another step in the right direction.\u201d<\/p>\n
But haven\u2019t the Wild learned how to lose enough in the last decade? Especially this core? How many more heartbreaks do they need to \u201cmature\u201d and figure it out?<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, they found out that the season ending in mid-May is just as painful as it feels in late April.<\/p>\n
Especially the embarrassing and preventable way it happened this time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DENVER \u2014 Fifteen minutes after the most shocking loss in Minnesota Wild playoff history, general manager and president…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":670403,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,7522,7524,575,85],"class_list":["post-670402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-colorado-avalanche","tag-minnesota-wild","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670402","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=670402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/670403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=670402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=670402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=670402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}