Wild Season Opener

Hockey is finally back in play! After a long 5 months without Wild Hockey we can all get our fix now, and after seeing them play today I'm going to need something strong. Looking at the Box score of the game you would think that the Wild played a pretty good game and may have just had an unlucky bounce, but it brings up more questions and they seemed to continue bad trends of last year. There were obvious weaknesses that if are not fixed, will be exploited all year long and have Wild fans up in arms.



One of the big things that sticks out to me right away, and is a very positive thing, is that Koivu, Burns, Havlat, and Latendresse all put up a point and Cullen put up two. Each of these players has the potential and opportunity to do so on either a nightly or every other night basis. All five will and should be the core of this team, they should be able to open space for other players on the team and create opportunity's for themselves and will be leaned heavily on for the entire season, but it is good to see them start out this way and not slowly making people wondering about the legitimacy of how talented each player really is or if the bar is set to high. For now those questions will wait.



Coming into last season new Wild Coach Todd Richards said that this team was going to play a more "open" style offense, this is something that he might want to pull back on and focus a little more on D. Throughout the game this team at times looked completely lost not knowing if they were playing a zone or man D. Along with the penalty kills, leaving men open at the front of the net, and not making them work for it, this team defensively just didn't have it going and will need to improve if they want to make a run at the playoffs this year. It is the beginning of the season and have the players capable of improving and they have a lot more opportunities to do so.



I have been talking about this for the last year now. There is going to be a Goalie problem this year if Backstrom is not able to get back on track lowering his goals against average (GAA) back to around 2.2 and save percentage back to the .920's. This is big year for him and with the Wild signing a proven vet to back him up in Jose Theodore he needs to show that he is not just a product of the Jacques Lemaire system and fast if the wild D can't pull it together. If he is not carefull he could find himself as back up and even on the block come the trade deadline.



Now don't take anything that I have said here as pushing the panic button, these were all areas that coming into the season they needed to fix and everyone was aware of but watching this team play today I saw no real change in the system. After 5 long months I saw the same thing that I did last year without skipping a beat.



Yes, there were some good spots like the Wild dominating on face offs. It does seem that there is an upgrade at center that they really needed from last year, but with 2 min left they lost 3 big face offs to keep the puck in the Hurricane zone and get Backstrom off the ice for the extra attacker.



I am going to chalk this game up to a number of things such as the first game of the season where both teams looked sloppy, Jet lag, thinner air in a higher elevation, every time the play was stopped by the goalie they would shine that spot light on him like a goal was scored (which was a horrible thing to do and created may false cheers while we were in the offensive zone where I was watching the game at), and home sickness. Now some of those might not have had anything to do with it but oh well, it is just game one of and 82 game season there is still plenty of time to pull together and get this thing going. I do think that they could make a push to try and make the playoffs this year but not till addressing some of these issues.