Panthers clip Wild on skills, 2-1 Wild lose for fourth time in five games

In St Paul, the Minnesota Wild continue to have issues winning games.

On Monday night, the Wild hosted the Florida Panthers,, another club needing wins.

Sergei Bobrovsky made 27 saves and the Panthers downed the Wild, 2-1, after penalties.

“I think we pulled the rope in the same direction, and it’s so much fun to be part of it,” Bobrovsky said.

After a scoreless first period, Eetu Luostarinen scored in the middle frame to give the Panthers a 1-0 lead.

“It was a hard grind today,” Florida’s Anton Lundell said. “It took 65 minutes plus a shootout, but [a] really big win for us.”

The Wild are 1-3-1 in their last five.

Kirill Kaprizov scored at 5:15 of the second to tie the game, 1-1, with his 30th of the campaign.

“All of us need to find a way to fight through and get a dirty goal, find a way to score, make an uneasy play, dig deep, and I think if all of us can do that,” Kaprizov said. “If we find our game, get back to the basics, get back to playing the way we play, we can find a way to win and ultimately start winning some of these games.”

Minnesota dropped to 28-20-5.

“Not talking about the offense anymore,” Wild coach Dean Evason said. “Honestly, why? We talked to the group about that, too. If we continue to talk, ‘We can’t score, we can’t score, we can’t score,’ eventually you’ll think you can’t score.

“We’re going to score the way we score. We’re going to get to the net, we’re going to play 5-on-5. When we do that, we’re going to catch some more breaks. … We’ve just got to keep grinding away.”

The Panthers’ Aleksander Barkov was credited with the deciding goal in the skills portion of the evening’s affairs.

“There wasn’t a lot of flow in that game,” Florida coach Paul Maurice said. “… Both teams’ penalty kill was really good, both teams’ goalies were really good on the penalty kill. That’s the important part. Both teams will think they had opportunities to shoot pucks that they probably didn’t on the power play. So, it gets to even.”

Filip Gustavsson made 33 saves in the Minnesota loss.