After a tough battle at the Global Series in Stockholm, Sweden the Minnesota Wild need to figure out their identity and start to gain ground in the standings. Frank Seravalli and Tyler Yaremchuk talk about what the Wild need to do moving forward, and Frank opens up about his chat with Wild general manager Bill Guerin.
Tyler Yaremchuk: The title of this segment is, ‘Wildly unacceptable’ and you know Marcus Foligno came out and spoke to the media after the loss to Toronto in Stockholm and I’m paraphrasing a bit but said "hey we lost two games in OT but we had fun as a team and started to find our game." Sure, but you didn’t win the game and those two points count in the standings and in today’s NHL that’s like going one for one but I have legit concerns with this Minnesota Wild team and I think they’re missing star power and swagger they’ve had in past years.
Frank Seravalli: I’m with you, and you mentioned my podcast “Frankly Speaking” I sat down for 35 minutes with Wild GM Bill Guerin and that episode drops today (Monday). That headline we came up with, the unacceptable part comes from his mouth. He read this team the riot act before they went to Sweden. I do think you saw glimpses of this team taking a step in the right direction in the Global Series. If you look at their penalty kill percentage it was 84% and that’s huge because they were down at 62 or 65 for the regular season. So if you can have an 84% weekend, that’s good, that’s a step in the right direction. It only essentially boils down to going one for one on the trip but I did like what I saw.
One interesting thing about talking to Guerin was how many interesting ways this team can improve. You have a back-to-back 100-point season and last year’s playoff loss was defeating but you have most of the same guys back and Jared Spurgeon is back and that was a huge loss for the Wild at the start. I think you can see the opening and the fact Guerin said effort and compete was the one thing that stood out at the start of the year and that’s what’s unacceptable, that gives me some hope that this team can get back to where they need to be.
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