Following the game, he said he felt, “Just fine. Nothing special. Not bad. Not good.”<\/p>\n
Boucher said he didn’t like Gustavsson’s demeanor, a reason for why he believes Wallstedt will start Game 3. However, he also said going back to Wallstedt puts the rookie in a strange situation, having to come back into the same series he was pulled from only to now have to help his team save its season.<\/p>\n
“If it was a different team and a different arc of their trajectory I would say this is a great situation for a young player to learn on the fly,” Boucher said, “but for Minnesota this is about winning. It’s not about getting experience. If he was on the Philadelphia Flyers, then I would say this is a great experience for him because they’ve got many years to go. But I feel for Minnesota, the decisions they make right now are for now.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“For Wallstedt it is going to be a great experience for him and I think he’s going to be a very good goalie, but it just seems like an odd situation to be in. I would have played him in Game 2 to see if he could bounce back. That would have been the great test to see, what is this kid’s mental toughness when it didn’t go his way? Can he rebound? And then I think you go to the veteran. That’s all I was thinking. But we’ll see if he can bounce back.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
That’s why the three days between games and five days between starts could be exactly what Wallstedt and the Wild need to avoid a 3-0 series deficit Saturday.<\/p>\n
“Five days for him is a really good period to reset, regroup, get a breather, figure out how you can get your game back in order and get the rest that’s needed to have a quality game,” Boucher said. “Any time you’re down in a series your urgency level and your desperation level goes up, so you can lean on that.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“The other thing is you’re coming home. It’s not like you lost two at home and now you’re going on the road and it feels like a daunting task. If there is any type of reassurance it’s that you’re coming home, you’ve had three days to regroup, digest and maybe make some adjustments that can work in your favor.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Following the game, he said he felt, “Just fine. Nothing special. Not bad. Not good.” Boucher said he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":630466,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":["post-630465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=630465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/630466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=630465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=630465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=630465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}