Wild stall Red Wings, 7-4

In St Paul, Matt Boldy hit for his first career NHL hat trick to help the Minnesota Wild down the visiting Detroit Red Wings., 7-4, on Monday night.

Kirill Kaprizov added a pair of goals for the Wild.

“It’s crazy, for sure,” Boldy said. “You definitely soak it in as much as you can, but you don’t want to make too much of it, I guess. Just kind of build off each night and, obviously, this is a big night for me. So hopefully just bring that into Wednesday against Winnipeg and kind of use that to build confidence and keep playing well.”

Minnesota improved to 30-11-3.

“It’s scary the depth that I think that we have,” the Wild’ Jordan Greenway said. “We can rely on everyone for different things, whether it’s getting on the score sheet or locking down another line, whatever the case is. We can rely on pretty much everyone, so that’s definitely a good feeling and it’s going to be good for us going down the stretch for sure.”

Kaapo Kahkonen made 30 saves in the win.

Dylan Larkin opened the scoring in the game to give Detroit a 1-0 lead.

“I think it was a game we could have won,” Larkin said. “I’m shaking my head right now. It’s not a good feeling. We understand the position we’re in. We know we’re not going to win every game, but I really felt it was a game we could have won tonight.”

Detroit dropped to 22-22-6.

“I thought the game early was real loose,” Detroit head coach Jeff Blashill said. “Certainly there was a lot of chances flying around both ways without teams necessarily having to earn it. They were able to get to their game better than we were as the game went along.”

Gustav Lindstrom extended the Detroit lead to 2-0 with his first NHL goal in the opening frame.

“What are you going to do, yell at them, tell them to settle down?” Wild head coach Dean Evason said. “Our group wasn’t overly excited, they weren’t down. We had a lot of real good play everywhere. We trusted them to figure it out.”

In the third period, after the Wild had taken a 4-2 lead through two periods  Joel Eriksson Ek scored for a 5-2 Wild lead.

Lucas Raymond (power play) and Sam Gagner scored to get the Red Wings within 5-4.

“We battled,” Larkin said. “We got our first 6-on-5 goal in a while and it was our best 6-on-5 play that we’ve had. We had the puck and generated chances and attacked the net. So we hung in there, but it was too little, too late.”

In the final minute of the third period, Kaprizov hit for an empty-net goal, and Ryan Hartman  scored off an odd man rush for the 7-4 final.

Alex Nedeljkovic made 18 saves.