In St Paul, the Wild spotted the Anaheim Ducks a 2-0 lead in the first period and needed to crawl back with two goals to force their match into extra time which settled nothing on Tuesday night.
Rickard Rakell potted the deciding goal in the skills portion of the evening’s events, his goal of the game, to give the Ducks a 3-2 win.
John Gibson made 22 saves in the win that snapped a five-game skid.
“We’ve been in a lot of close games lately and coming out on top of this one, it’s a huge deal for us,” Rakell said. “Just the environment, feeling in the room, even though we have been playing well but we lost close games — at the end of the day we lose — so being on top of this one feels great.”
Ryan Hartman and Ryan Donato rallied the Wild back from the early deficit.
“These things can work for you and against you, when you have those ceremonies before the game,” Ducks head coach Dallas Eakin said. “Your players can be all fired up and excited, and we were more on, ‘we better be ready to go to jump on them there because they might be flying.’ And sometimes there’s a bit of a letdown for the home team, ‘Hey, they’ve had this big ceremony and now it’s ok we’re going to play the game.’ But our guys were certainly ready to go.”
Rakell and Cam Fowler scored in the opening frame for Anaheim.
“It was a good win for us,” the Ducks’ Max Comtois said. “We showed a lot of character in the third. I think we could have pulled out the win in overtime, but we stuck with it and found a way to kill that huge two minutes in overtime, our guys did a really good job. We bounced back after that and we found a way to win.”
[WATCH: All Ducks vs. Wild highlights]
Kaapo Kahkonen made 31 saves in the loss.
“The whole night was pretty frustrating, quite frankly,” Wild head coach Bruce Boudreau said. “To start out that first period like that, to get one shot on goal at home, it’s pretty embarrassing, and I told the guys that. I said, ‘Our first 10 games weren’t very good, like with the won-loss record, but nothing compares to what we did in the first period.”
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