Wild keep pace in Central race

In St Paul, Jonas Brodin‘s empty-net goal with under two minutes left on the game clock, blunted a Blues rally and helped the Wild defeat St Louis, 5-3 on Saturday. Filip Gustavsson made 37 saves in the Wild win.

Minnesota moved to 45-24-10.

Ryan Hartman and Sam Steel scored shorthanded goals for the Wild.

“It helps to win,” Hartman said. “We lost three in a row. You can’t really do that in the playoffs. We’re ready to get these next games going.”

Sammy Blais scored in the first period to give the Blues a 1-0 lead.

Minnesota replied with four straight goals for a 4-1 lead.

“Those two short-handed goals we gave up kind of deflated us for a while,” the Blues Justin Faulk said. “We didn’t really play a good second period at all. We came in, wanted to play a hard 20 minutes in the third period and see if we could kind of create something, put them on their heels a little bit. We were able to do that for the most part. [We] had some looks to get it even, but it just didn’t go our way.”

Hartman and Steel scored their goals for a 2-1 lad after the first.

“Yeah, I mean they had a couple careless plays on the drops,” Hartman said. “Just trying to take advantage of it. One breakaway. I guess you can call it a breakaway, a semi-breakaway. It kind of got us in front when maybe we weren’t really pushing too hard.”

The Wild scored twice in the middle frame for a 4-1 lead.

“We’ve talked about it pretty much all year, that different people have stepped up,” Wild coach Dean Evason said. “The commitment was real good. Obviously, do we want to give up a lead like that? No. There’s some stuff to work on like I said, but we enjoyed our commitment tonight.”