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Wild Blog: Wild Look Flat, Fall To Flyers 3-1

By Craig D Schroepfer (CDSWCCO)

The Minnesota Wild had a chance Thursday night to clinch a playoff berth with a victory over the Philadelphia Flyers.

Fresh off a 3-2 win over San Jose on Tuesday, you would figure the Wild would come out & play inspired hockey.

You would be wrong.

Instead Minnesota looked flat and spent most of the night chasing the Flyers around the ice when they had the puck, falling 3-1 to Philadelphia.

"It felt like we were pretty flat for a lot of the game." forward Zach Parise said. "Our passing was off. We had guys open and we missed them. We had a lot of one and dones in the offensive zone."

Parise would score the first goal of the game, going hard to the net and chipping the puck past Steve Mason to give the Wild a 1-0 lead.

It looked Minnesota would go into the first intermission with the lead until Sean Couturier beat Devan Dubnyk down low on a backhand shot with 2:01 left in the period, tying the game 1-1.

Philadelphia would take the lead 21 seconds into the second period when Matt Read crashed the net, knocking the puck off Matt Dumba's stick and put it past Dubnyk, giving the Flyers a 2-1 lead.

"Anytime you give up goals in the last couple minutes of a period it's tough on your mind." defenseman Ryan Suter said. "Coming in the locker room 1-1 after one period we should have came out with a lot better effort and we didn't."

In the third period, Philadelphia took a page out of head coach Dave Hakstol's playbook when he was the head coach at North Dakota, sitting on the lead and forcing Minnesota to chase the puck. The strategy worked as Minnesota was never able to get possession of the puck and get a good scoring chance to tie the game.

"It seemed like everything we were chasing after we were a half step behind them both offensively and defensively" center Eric Staal said. "We had to fight hard to get pucks back. When we were close to getting the puck it was thrown away from us or we just weren't executing the play after we had the puck. We just weren't as crisp as we normally are."

Minnesota is now 2-8 in their last ten games. Slumps are common in the NHL and every team goes through them. The Wild just happen to be going through one as the season is coming to an end. It's nothing to panic about at the moment but it is a cause for concern according to head coach Bruce Boudreau.

"I'm concerned because I'm use to them having some jump and energy." Boudreau said. "For me to sit here and say everything is good when you've lost eight out of ten it's not as good as you'd like it. I'm confident that this team will be ready when that time comes in the playoffs but at the same time you like to play every game like you think they are capable of playing."

The next opportunity for Minnesota to clinch a playoff spot will be Saturday when the team hosts the Vancouver Canucks.

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