In St Paul, the Minnesota Wild gave up another seven goals on Saturday. THis time to the Los Angeles Kings a 7-6 loss for the Wild.
The Kings’ Kevin Fiala had a goal against his former team.
“Sometimes you feel better than other days, and today I felt pretty good from the start,” Fiala said. “Obviously a little more motivated playing against them, my old team, but it was good. A good first step in our direction and myself as well, and now we just have to build from it.”
Cal Petersen made 29 saves in the LA win.
“If you’d have told us we were going to score seven goals, I’d have been jumping for joy,” Los Angeles coach Todd McClellan said. “The giving up the six isn’t the ideal recipe. That’s a really hard game to explain. I’m not sure that we’re going to give six goals up and win a game again this year. … Strange night.”
Mats Zuccarello struck for a pair of goals for the Wild.
“I don’t really have words,” Zuccarello said. “You can’t expect to win games when you let in 14 goals in two games. Sometimes we play defense like we’re a [bleeping] junior team. It’s the whole team. We’ve got to sharpen up. We can’t play like that. Our mentality last year was to play good, hard defense. So far, we haven’t seen that.
“I mean, we’re coming down and fighting back. You’ve got to give it to the guys, showed some team spirit. But it’s not good enough.”
Kirill Kaprizov and Joel Eriksson Ek added single markers in the loss.
“Everybody struggled, right? You get seven goals scored on, your team struggles,” Minnesota coach Dean Evason said. “To pin it on one guy or one guy didn’t play well from the goalie out … everybody didn’t play well, or else we would have not given up seven goals.”
Adrian Kempe hit for a double for LA.
Alex Iafallo and Gabriel Vilardi added markers for the Kings.
“Obviously we don’t want to give up that many goals, but every time when they we score, we just scored right back,” Fiala said. “We killed their momentum, and that was huge tonight.
“Just a good overall team win. We never gave up. We stick with it, and that’s what a good team does.”
Jacob Middleton and Eriksson Ek s also scored for the Wild.
Drew Doughty and Matt Roy added single markers to the LA total.
“Offensively, it was a really good game for us, so that was a step in the right direction for us,” Kempe said. “On the other side of the puck, I think there are still some things we can improve, but you know, I think we deserved the win tonight. Even if it was 1-0 or 7-6, it doesn’t matter right now. That’s a huge first win. We got better in all three zones, and that was a good thing.”
Marc-Andre Fleury made 10 saves and surrendered four goals before getting the hook in the first intermission.
Filip Gustavsson made 17 saves in a mop up role.
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