ST. PAUL -- Minnesota Wild coach Dean Evason asked for blue collar before the matchup with the Seattle Kraken on Thursday night at Xcel Energy Center.
With the Wild missing a number of key players — wingers Jordan Greenway, Marcus Foligno, Ryan Hartman and Brandon Duhaime have all suffered upper-body injuries in the past couple of weeks — Evason knew his team was going to have to work extremely hard if they wanted to have success. Especially considering the Wild decided to go with 11 forwards and 7 defensemen for the game.
Instead, the Wild spent pretty much the whole game fighting the puck in a 4-0 loss to the Kraken.
It was a rough start for the Wild as they failed to register a shot for more than 10 minutes. It got so bad that the crowd delivered a mock cheer when Mason Shaw fired a harmless puck at Kraken goaltender Martin Jones exactly 11 minutes, 40 seconds into the game.
Still, the Wild defended well enough in their own zone to keep the Kraken off the scoreboard.
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That changed early in the second period when Kraken center Morgan Geekie snuck the puck past Marc-Andre Fleury to make it 1-0. The lead grew later in the frame when Kraken defenseman Jamie Oleksiak pinched up in the play and finished off an odd-man rush to push his team in front 2-0.
Though the Wild seemed to wake up after that, Kraken center Alex Wennberg made it 3-0 a few minutes later when a puck ricocheted into the net off his back. The officials initially waved the goal off thinking Wennberg headbutted the puck past the goal line. They overturned the call after a brief video review.
In search of a spark in the third period, Evason decided to play Matt Boldy between Kirill Kaprizov on the top line. Not even that could ignite the Wild.
With the game well in hand down the stretch, Wennberg notched another goal, bodying Calen Addison in front and redirecting a shot from the point to finalize the score at 4-0.
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