The Wild offense finally hit a wall, but not before running low on options.
Already shorthanded up front due to injury and illness, the team went down two more forwards briefly in the second period and the Wild's patchwork response was reflected in 3-0 fizzle to the Blues on Sunday in front of 18,745 at Xcel Energy Center that wrapped a back-to-back winless weekend.
"We got disrupted in the second," coach Dean Evason said. "But we have to find a way to win a hockey game like that, grind it out, and we didn't."
This is the first time the Wild have dropped consecutive games since Dec. 7-9, and the scoring outage came after an impressive surge; in the previous three games, the Wild posted five goals each time out and had been averaging almost four a game for about a month.
But this wasn't the same lineup that had been filling the net with goals lately.
Mats Zuccarello was out for a second straight game with an upper-body injury, and Evason said the team knew Jordan Greenway would be unavailable just before the game. The team announced Greenway was out with a non-COVID illness.
That left only 11 forwards in action against St. Louis, but the Wild's manpower took another hit in-game.
Ryan Hartman left in the second after getting caught up high by the Blues' Robert Thomas. While he was away, Joel Eriksson Ek exited after a collision with Noel Acciari.
"Just didn't see each other," Eriksson Ek said. "I'm good."
Evason also mentioned Mason Shaw "got cut, as well, so we lost three players," and the team had defenseman Calen Addison lining up at forward.
"That was the difference," Evason said. "It just took our rhythm out."
Hartman returned before the second adjourned, but Eriksson Ek didn't resurface until the start of the third period.
That's when the switch flipped.
After managing a measly three shots in the scramble that was the second period, the Wild amped up the pressure and dominated the shot clock to set a franchise record for shots in a third period at 23 and fall one shy of the team record for any period.
"We'd like to have some better luck around the net, but it wasn't the case," Matt Dumba said.
Four pucks came off Kirill Kaprizov's stick, and Matt Boldy supplied another three. Six tries were on the power play (0-for-3). Overall, the Wild tacked on 39 shot attempts in the third but were unsuccessful on every one of them.
Kaprizov finished with a game-high six shots on net and an eye-popping 17 shot attempts, but his 14-game point streak that's tied with Marian Gaborik (2007-08) for the longest in franchise history ended.
At 26 minutes, 39 seconds, Kaprizov established a career high in ice time; so did Boldy with 24:56.
Blues goalie Thomas Greiss turned a ho-hum effort into a well-earned 35-save shutout.
"We could've generated more, for sure, more shots that get through," Boldy said. "They had a lot of blocks (25), which is never good."
St. Louis registered only four shots in the third, and half ended up as goals. Brayden Schenn polished off a 2-on-1 at 14 minutes and then dumped the puck into an empty net with six seconds remaining.
But the only goal the Blues would ultimately need came much earlier, at 8:17 of the first period on the power play (1-for-4) when Brandon Saad buried a tap-in at the back post. Saad, Schenn and Colton Parayko (two assists) all had two-point nights for a St. Louis squad that moved four points back of the Wild in the Central Division.
Goaltender Filip Gustavsson, who was back after leaving his last start early and sitting out the 6-5 overtime loss at Buffalo on Saturday because of illness, made 21 stops.
"We saw our team in the third period," Evason said. "Unfortunately, the puck didn't want to go in the net. We did real good things in the third period to try to get back into that hockey game, and it just didn't work out."
