The Dallas Stars look to advance to the second round and close out the Wild's season tonight here in Dallas.
Devan Dubnyk vs. Antti Niemi.
Wild lines:
Granlund-Koivu-Jones
Niederreiter-Haula-Pominville
Zucker-Coyle-Schroeder
Porter-Stoll-Gabriel
D pairs:
Suter-Spurgeon
Scandella-Prosser
Brodin-Dumba
So, that means Jarret Stoll re-enters the lineup after being scratched in the two home games and Jordan Schroeder enters for his series debut.
He scored two goals and two assists in 26 games this season and played three playoff games for the Wild last season.
Justin Fontaine, on the ice for both of Dallas' Game 4 power-play goals, comes out, as does Zac Dalpe. Ryan Carter won't play for a third game in a row as Kurtis Gabriel remains in the lineup.
Defensemen Mike Reilly and Christian Folin's NHL playoff debuts wait.
Coach John Torchetti feels his team is ready.
"I thought you've seen it on the ice today [for the pregame skate]," he said. "I think that we're focused. I think the guys are prepared. Talked about finished the season .500 on the road, probably could have had a good chance of winning Game 2, go to overtime. We've got to find a way to get one win in this building and get back home. That's most important, getting back home and that means we win the game."
Today was the first chance I got to talk to Ryan Suter since Torchetti twice mentioned the defenseman not blocking Ales Hemsky's shot on the Stars' first power-play goal in the second period Wednesday.
"My focus is on tonight and deal with that later," Suter said. "It doesn't matter. We're focused on tonight and what happened last game doesn't really matter right now. We've got to win tonight. That's the bottom line."
On tonight, Suter said, "We've got to get in a good mindset and just be ready, ready from the start. We know they're going to come hard. We have to be desperate. It's do or die and we have to make sure we enter the game that way."
The Wild needs a shooting mentality tonight, especially after easing into Games 1 and 2 here. The Wild was outshot 14-2 in the first period of Game 1 and 14-7 in the first period of Game 2.
"We have to get a lot of pucks to the net," Suter said. "From the start, we've got to be ready to go. We've got to be putting pucks at the net, we've got to be putting everything at the net. I thought we did a good job last game at home and even Game 3."
Similarly, Jarret Stoll said, "We all know we just have to win a game and bring it back it back to our great fans in Minnesota. We all know what kind of support we have back home, and we have to put it all together tonight here, and bring it back. It's not going to be easy. It's going to take our best game of the series probably. Most likely they're going to have their best, and we're going to need our best in order to move on."
Stoll said it was tough missing the home games.
"You never want to sit out," he said. "You always want to your help your team win, and be in the locker room with the guys, and battling on the ice with the guys. It will be good to get back in tonight."
He reminded the old sports line that the hardest game to win in a series is an elimination game.
"It's a lot of pressure on whoever is up three games to whatever to close out a series; to win that fourth game," Stoll said. "There's a lot of pressure on that team, and that's probably the hardest win to get. You always hear it, but it's true. … Put the pressure on them. The pressure is on them to win Game 5 at home. We can play our game our way, and with our style, we should hopefully be alright."
Added Jason Pominville, "We have to lay it all out for sure. We have our backs against the wall. We've been in this position before where we have to find ways to win, and we have to do it on the road. We would have had to have won a game here anyway, so we might as well do it tonight and go from there."
Schroeder is excited to get in tonight.
"Everyone wants to be in the lineup. You're upset if you're not," he said.
He hopes to bring "That speed element. I'm going to try to create some offense, and get pucks to the net. Just bringing some speed and creativity."
Schroeder said he was told he didn't play Games 1-4 because "they wanted some PK guys in there, and I haven't PK'd up here. I PK'd a lot down in Iowa this year, and I thought it was an element I could get into. At that point in the season they didn't want to mess with things, and I understand. Do I want to be in? Of course. If you don't want to be in, then why even play the game?"
The Stars expect a tough game.
"You're playing against a team that's looking to try to stay alive," said Jason Spezza. "They're going to throw everything at us. We've had to make some adjustments the last couple games, but for the most part we just got to play our game. We're happy to be back home, use the crowd to our advantage and try to win the special teams battle again."
Added captain Jamie Benn, "We just want to come out tonight with a strong effort, try and close this thing out. Obviously, we've had a pretty good record in this home building, so it's up to us to come out with a strong effort and see what we can do."
The Wild has really taken advantage of John Klingberg this series. He has no points and is minus-4.
"If I looked at this play I need a little bit of improved play of him," coach Lindy Ruff said. "I think at times he's tried some high-skill plays at inopportune times, but it's his first go-around. He's made some unbelievable plays for us this year and the same type of plays that maybe he's tried inside this series have hurt him. I think the first thing in my discussion with him today was take care of your own end first. If you take care of that first, everything else will usually take care of itself. He's a great kid, he's a student of the game and I think he's come a long ways as a player this year."
Also, he said this about going up against Torchetti: "I think he's done a great job with the team. He was diligent with some of the matchups he wanted to try to get inside the game and it made it extremely tough for me to get away from some of them, rotated some lines. I think sometimes when you're losing you do that out of desperation. At the same time, I've been able to get favorable matchups here, which makes it tough on him. That's really just the advantage of being at home, which is probably another factor taking advantage a lot of sometimes matchups when we can get them at key times in games, which have allowed us to win games here."
Ruff wants the series to end tonight, of course.
"I've always said when you have a chance to get it done, you've got to get it done because when you don't all it does is it shifts momentum the other direction," he said. "They got their backs up against the wall, they have nothing to lose. Nothing to lose is kind of a funny saying, but they can get after it. They're on the brink. We're in the same category, we want to play basically the same type of way we played in Game 4, we got on our toes, we played an aggressive style. We want to stay on the puck. I still think we've got room for better execution of our game where I haven't liked some of our puck movement. There was a good time in the second period I really started to like it again. I liked the way we started Game 3, but I didn't like the way we finished it, so it'd be nice from an execution standpoint to try to put a full 60 minutes together."
Talk to you tonight.
