In St Paul, the Wild scored three first period goals on Sunday en route to a 4-1 win over the Chicago Blackhawks.
It was the third straight win for the Wild.
Marco Rossi scored a double in the first period to give the Wild a 2-0 lead.
Rossi scored at 2:11 and then again, off the power play at 12:08.
“Our confidence right now is really good as a team,” said Rossi. “We won three in a row. We just try to get better every day.”
Marc-Andre Fleury made 28 saves in the win.
“It’s really been a good week, and I think today, it was just continuing to hammer home the way we want to play,” Wild coach John Hynes said. “We got off to a little bit of a slow start. The penalty kill was big early. (Fleury) had some nice saves, but then I thought that we wanted to get to, what we think is going to give us the best chance to win. So, it was nice that we could put, for the most part, three pretty complete games together.”
The Wild improved to 8-10-4.
“It was a good game,” Fleury said. “Good, all parts of it. I thought we settled in and played the way we want to, with some speed, some pace. We had the puck a lot. We’re not giving them too much the second and third. PP looked good. So, yeah, fun win.”
Mats Zuccarello scored at at 17:07 of the first for a 3-0 lead headed to the middle frame.
Chicago dropped to 7-16-0.
“Well, definitely not a good night for us,” Chicago coach Luke Richardson said. “They’re probably still showing their new coach that they want to play and they really, I thought they outskated us and competed us in those tough areas, especially in front of the net and corners. You’re not going to win many games when you get outworked and outbattled in those areas.
“I’m not saying that we didn’t try. I think our guys tried, but we have to find a desperation level that they showed us tonight. And we have done that. It’s a matter of, stop feeling sorry for yourself, and going to do it.”
Matt Boldy ballooned the advantage to 4-0 with a power play strike at 11:36.
Taylor Raddysh was the lone striker for the Blackhawks, his goal at 12:55 of the third broke up the shutout bid and made it 4-1 for the final count.
“I feel like we came out to a good start considering the back-to-back,” Raddysh said. “We kind of let that slide away once they got one there. Something we’ve got to try be better. We can’t just fall apart when something bad happens to us. We’ve got to bounce right back and just keep playing the way we’re playing. We can’t let those go away because then we’re down a couple of goals and it’s hard to climb back when that happens.”
Petr Mrazek made 30 saves in the loss.
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