There’s a long hill to climb and the Minnesota Wild are realistic enough to know they are in trouble, but for one night at least they found a way past the St Louis Blues.
On Wednesday night, the Wild picked up a 2-0 win to avoid the sweep in St Louis behind Devan Dubnyk who made 28 saves.
“We just said coming into this game, we need to win one game and this is the only thing that matters is this one game,” Dubnyk said. “This was our Stanley Cup. And that’s gonna be the same thing on Saturday, because if not, it’s over, and we’re not gonna think any further ahead than that. It’s gonna be the exact same approach on Saturday, and we’ll see where the score is when the buzzer ends and move forward.”
Charlie Coyle and Martin Hanzal struck for goals for the Wild as they now trail the series, 3-1.
“With the two days off, I thought they handled it well among themselves,” Wild head coach Bruce Boudreau said. “They didn’t let themselves get down. They faced some bad times in the last six weeks and they didn’t get themselves down. [Heck], it’s only one game. They still have a tremendous advantage up three games to one. I think we can play a lot better still than we played tonight. It’s going to still be an uphill battle.”
The series heads back to St Paul for Game 5 on Saturday.
“We started turning it a little bit, but again, details of our game that cost us that one,” St. Louis’ Alexander Steen said. “Again, I think throughout the course of the game we were just a second off. We needed to be a little quicker, a little sharper to create the havoc and earn those goals.”
The Wild will now take it one game at a time and look to get past Game 5 before worrying about Game 6.
“We worked hard. We did what we had to do to win. It wasn’t always the prettiest of hockey. Again, we did what we set out to do, which was come here and get one. That was the first step,” Minnesota’s Zach Parise said after the win.
[WATCH: All Wild vs. Blues highlights | RELATED: Complete Minnesota vs. St. Louis series coverage]
Jake Allen, who made 26 saves, was merely human in the loss; he had been the number pone star in the three previous games.
“It took a little bit for us to get going,” Allen said. “They obviously came out hard and played a really good 40 minutes, they played a pretty solid defensive third period. We had a really good push in the third, and it was a little too late.”
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