Wild continue offensive feast with 5-1 win over Panthers

After giving up the first goal of the game to the Florida Panthers, Thursday, the Minnesota Wild reeled off five unanswered goals to beat the Panthers, 5-1, in St Paul.

Nino Niederreiter struck twice to erase the lead and give the Wild a 2-1 lead. 

The Wild improved to 17-12-2.

Minnesota has scored 12 goals in their last two games including Thursday.

“A lot of times in hockey a team scores 7, 8 goals [and] they get one the next game and the next day you’re saying, ‘Geez, I wish we had saved some for that day,'” Minnesota head coach Bruce Boudreau said. “So to go back-to-back with more than two goals, and to me, more importantly, to allow under two goals in two games, is really a feather in our cap.”

Devan Dubnyk made 30 saves to get the win,

Denis Malgin scored the lone Panthers goal.

“I feel that we come into the game with great intentions to [play with pride and passion] and we just let it slip away,” Florida defenseman Aaron Ekblad said. “We’re a few mistakes here and there from being right in this game until the very end so I don’t know what needs to change, but we’ll figure it out at some point. We need to.”

Florida dropped to 11-13-6.

Eric Staal, Zach Parise and Jonas Brodin also scored for the Wild.

“We’re having fun,” Parise said. “They’re buzzing, we’re moving our feet, we’re talking all the time and we’re getting the results right now.”

[WATCH: All Panthers vs. Wild highlights]

James Reimer made 21 saves in the loss.

“[Minnesota’s] best players were better than our best players. I thought that [Aleksander Barkov‘s] line looked slow all game, they didn’t have great legs, they looked like they had heavy legs,” Panthers coach Bob Boughner said after the loss. “Sometimes you want them to play through it and you think they’re going to figure it out, and they just never did. … Disappointing loss, especially the last 10, 15 minutes. Even when you’re down, the message is play to the buzzer and play with pride. I thought some guys did and I didn’t think some guys did.”