Heiskanen was questionable for Game 1 right up until the night before because of a lower-body injury, and now he’s playing 43-plus minutes, including a game-high 9:54 on the penalty kill.<\/p>\n
“He’s gutted it out and the best part is is he’s getting better as the series is going, not only his game play but he’s healing up a little bit,” Gulutzan said. “You can see he’s on a real good path. To play that amount of minutes at that level is impressive, and I think what’s even more impressive is just the first game that he played, I don’t know where he was quite at there, but now you can see he’s improving every day.”<\/p>\n
The Wild also had defensemen Brock Faber<\/a> (38:56) and Jared Spurgeon<\/a> (33:30), and forwards Kirill Kaprizov<\/a> (36:22), Matt Boldy<\/a> (34:44) and Joel Eriksson Ek<\/a>\u00a0(32:44) play north of 30 minutes in Game 3.<\/p>\n Stars defenseman Esa Lindell<\/a>\u00a0(30:16) and Johnston (30:12) did too, with defenseman Thomas Harley<\/a>\u00a0(29:23) and forward Jason Robertson<\/a> (29:05) not far behind.<\/p>\n “They have to refuel,” Gulutzan said. “It’s hard to play at that intensity if you’re not getting any rest. As much as the momentum thing goes, everybody is on the same footing so it’s good to get rest for us.”<\/p>\n The extra day could be just what the Wild need to get forwards Mats Zuccarello<\/a> and Yakov Trenin<\/a>\u00a0back in the lineup for Game 4; Zuccarello has missed the past two games and Trenin sat out Game 3, each with an upper-body injury.<\/p>\n Hynes said he’ll know more about each player’s status Friday.<\/p>\n “We’ll see,” he said. “Hope these couple days help and see we’re at.”<\/p>\n Minnesota’s power play could use Zuccarello’s presence as a distributor from the half wall. They were 2-for-4 in Game 1 with Zuccarello picking up assists on the goals scored by Eriksson Ek. They are 1-for-11 in the past two games without him.<\/p>\n Hynes said the coaches spent most of Thursday morning digging into the power play and why it didn’t execute well enough, going 0-for-5 from the third period on. They discussed various options, likely scenarios involving if Zuccarello plays Saturday and if he doesn’t.<\/p>\n That’s part of coaching, though. There are no days off for them.\u00a0<\/p>\n The players, on the other hand, used Thursday strictly for recovery, time well spent on an extra off day that couldn’t have come at a better time in the series.<\/p>\n “Whatever the players need as far as sports performance, whether it’s massage and therapy and all that stuff, has to get done,” Gulutzan said, “because you’ve got to turn around and play one of those games again.”<\/p>\n NHL.com senior draft writer Mike G. Morreale contributed to this report<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Heiskanen was questionable for Game 1 right up until the night before because of a lower-body injury, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":624048,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-624047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=624047"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624047\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/624048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=624047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=624047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=624047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}