In St Paul, the visiting Los Angeles Kings grabbed an early three-goal lead over the Wild on Sunday night.
They promptly coughed that up in a 6-3 loss to the Minnesota Wild.
Marc-Andre Fleury made 31 saves after settling down from the early barrage.
“We weren’t playing bad,” Fleury said. “The breakaway to start and the power play I should’ve saved. The second one I didn’t see. It gave them momentum. I liked how everybody didn’t panic. I think it shows the maturity of the group and the character of the group. We kept pushing to get the next goal, and we did and we went from there.
“The team that we have, I always have confidence that we can comeback in games, and we did tonight.”
LA scored an even-strength, power play, and shorthanded strike and still lost.
“You score a power-play goal, you score a shorthanded goal, you get a 3-0 lead on the road, there’s no reason why you’re not in it at the end of the night, and we weren’t,” Kings coach Todd McLellan. “Really disappointing.”
Rasmus Kupari, Carl Grundstrom , and Adrian Kempe scored for the Kings.
“That third goal goes in, not going to lie to you, as a coach and a head coach, you go maybe the group needs a little twist here to wake us up,” Wild coach Dean Evason said. “You can call a timeout and yell at them, and we don’t like to do that. You want them to try to figure it out, or you can pull the goalie and it snaps them into place. … But we knew [Fleury] was going to compete his butt off after that. He almost broke his stick. … You knew he wasn’t happy with it. He’s accountable for it and he’s been through it. Same as we allow our team to figure it out, we don’t call a timeout to yell at them. We trust that they’ll figure it out. We trust that Marc-Andre Fleury will figure it out, too.”
Kirill Kaprizov, Matt Boldy, and Jared Spurgeon rallied the Wild back for a 3-3 tie.
“Definitely it feels good going out there and getting one tonight,” Boldy said. “I think it was a little bit of a slow start, for sure. Obviously not what we want to start a game, giving up three, but just looking how we played after and our response to it was good and what you want to see.”
Mats Zuccarello put the Wild ahead in the middle frame.
“I wasn’t happy with myself to start the game but loved how the guys responded and kept playing,” Fleury said. “We got some big goals to make the game close right away in the first. Then to score six is always a big help.”
Marcus Foligno and Nick Bjugstad added strikes in the third period for the 6-3 final.
Cal Petersen made 27 saves in the LA loss.
“We have to learn how to respond to their goal and push back instead of sitting back,” the Kings’ Phillip Danault said. “I think that’s the mistake we did again today, but we have to learn to move on.”
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