Wild clinch playoff spot

The Minnesota Wild won their seventh straight game on Saturday, 6-3, over the Sharks in San Jose.

The win clinched a spot in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, for the first time in nine seasons for the Wild.

Kaapo Kahkonen made 27 saves to get the win.

“[It’s] nice to not have to wait until the last week,” the Wild’s Jared Spurgeon said. “Not that the games don’t mean anything for the rest of the season, but just to know that you’re in a position and that you’re in the playoffs.

“But that’s just the first step of what we want to do. It was nice to do it tonight, for sure.”

The Sharks have lost eight straight.

“The start was a disaster,” Sharks head coach Bob Boughner said. “Right from the first shift, the first goal. We’re fighting for our lives, and to be down 1-0 on the first shot of the game was a horrible goal. I think it took some wind out of our sails, but that’s an excuse as well. You have to be able to rebound, you’ve got 59 more minutes to play, and I don’t think we did a good job at coming back from that adversity.

“You need saves at the right time in the game and we didn’t get them early, and now you’re chasing the game. You’d love to come out of that tied or leading after one and build your game and keep getting better, but we didn’t get the chance to do that.”

That bad start was a result of Ryan Suter scoring 19 seconds on first period fresh ice, Marcus Foligno made it 2-0, and Spurgeon pushed it to 3-0.

“There’s not one of us who doesn’t think we can’t be No. 1 in our division,” Foligno said. “It’s still in reach (five points behind Vegas). … There’s great teams in our division, but we’ve had success against them (4-1-1 vs. Vegas, 3-5 vs. Colorado).”

Logan Couture got the Sharks on the board after Kevin Fiala  gave the Wild a 4-0 lead.

“We’ve been falling behind by one, two, three [goals] pretty quickly. You can’t wait and only play 20 minutes, and that’s what we did tonight, only played 20 minutes the right way,” Couture said. “… Just wish that we showed up and played better from the drop of the puck.

“… Nothing really to be proud of tonight for us in that room. We got nine games left, we’ve got to play a lot harder than we did tonight.”

Kirill Kaprizov scored off the power play to give the Wild a 5-1 lead in the third period.

Evander Kane and Joachim Blichfeld scored to make the count, 5-3 to the Wild.

“It was nice to get [the first NHL goal] out of the way,” Blichfeld said. “It’s something I’ve been dreaming about since [I was] a young kid, so definitely it was good to see it go in.”

Nick Bonino added an empty-net goal for good measure.

“I think we’re still chasing the top teams. That’s probably the biggest thing right now,” Foligno said. “Yes, we did make the playoffs, which is a huge objective of ours starting the season, but we still feel like we can get higher and hopefully catch a team or two. We feel like there’s still work to be done. … We’re going to work as hard as we can until the final regular-season game and be ready for playoffs.”

Martin Jones got the start for San Jose, he yielded three goals and made five saves before getting the hook in the opening frame.

Josef Korenar made 15 saves in a mop up role.