Hot off the heels of beating Pittsburgh, the Bruins face the Minnesota Wild on their home turf.
Just the Facts
- The Time: 3:30pm EST
- The Place: Xcel Energy Center, St. Paul, Minnesota
- Place to Watch: NESN, TNT, truTV, MAX, SN360, TVAS
- Place to Listen: 98.5 The Sports Hub
- An Opposing Viewpoint: Hockey Wilderness
Know Your Enemy
- The Wild are 34-22-4 this season, which is good for 72 points, and 3rd in the Central Division standings.
- The Wild are run as of right now by two players; Matt Boldy and Kirill Kaprisov; both players have 52 points. Kaprisov however, is doing it in only 37 games played! Imagine, more than one player on a team contributing to it’s success!
- Kaprisov leads the Wild in scoring with 23 goals in 37 games, but Marco Rossi and Matt Boldy are hot on his heels. They both have 21 goals in 60 games.
- Filip Gustavsson has been the backbone of the Wild’s net, though recently they’ve been cycling through him and Marc-Andre Fleury. Gustavsson has a .912 SV% on 39 starts, and MAF has a .904 SV% in 19 starts.
Game Preview
The intersection of “it’s so over” and “we’re so back” has never been so close for Boston fans.
After a 5 game losing streak in which the only positive you could take from it is David Pastrnak is in fact still Him, the Bruins finally got off the hump against the Penguins yesterday. So naturally the loins gird a bit at the idea of facing Minnesota, a team that’s been clicking away with some nice quiet 5-2 wins here and there throughout the season, barring of course the games Marc-Andre Fleury starts to feel very, very old. There’s a hesitancy to assume that Boston stands much of a chance, right?
Well, Minny sure would like that to be the case, because recently they’ve been getting killed.
The Wild are without a lot of the talent that makes them good; Kaprisov’s hurt, Joel Eriksson Ek is hurt, they just traded for Gustav Nyquist with the Preds on account of their issues at forward, and they’re currently nursing a 3 game losing streak to Detroit, Utah, and Colorado; the Red Wings and Avalanche game featuring a truly disastrous sequence of events in which the Wild simply allowed the other team to score multiple goals unanswered.
In spite of all their success, the Wild are just as frazzled as Boston is right now.
So what needs to be done to defeat them? Well, if there’s anything that’s worked so far over this break, it’s making sure David Pastrnak has the room necessary to make his magic happen; he’s been dragging this team by the nose hairs to something, anything, resembling respectability for weeks now, and letting him cook is paramount. Create lanes for him to shoot and pass, make as much space as you can. After that? It’s all about who wants to join in. Marchand’s injury is minor but will likely keep him out of this game, and so that leaves a boatload of players who need to make something, anything out of their efforts right now. Some of them are expecting to not be wearing a Bruins sweater by the end of the week, so if they want to be on teams that have a more realistic shot to the playoffs, they need to get their ass in gear and now.
Also, and I’m really holding out on hope that he’s just following the career trend of his agent-mate William Nylander, if Swayman plays tonight, they’re gonna need him to play better than he’s been. Matt Boldy and Marco Rossi are still here. Mats Zuccarello and Frederick Gaudreau are doing pretty well themselves. This defense can only be trusted with the bare minimum and sometimes not even that. They’re gonna need saves, full stop.
Otherwise, one thing they absolutely should try taking advantage of is their absolutely atrocious penalty kill, which currently sits at 31st overall in the league. Even with a power play as miserable as Boston’s is, you must make the most of any and all opportunities of an even more dead corpse of special teams that heaves your way.
Either way, three games to go before the deadline. Let’s see how the NHL morphs and shifts around us, and let’s watch the B’s put the Wild in a potential existential crisis!