Game re-cap from JS Landry at Hockey Wilderness. Please read the full game re-cap for the Three Stars of the Game and the answers to the Five Questions of the night.
The game started off horribly as Benoit Pouliot, of all people, made Greg Zanon look like a damn traffic cone and zipped a pass to Ryan White to get him his first career goal. White is pretty much the Wild equivalent to Brad Staubitz, but a bit more talented. Then, Cal Clutterbuck inexplicably fumbled the puck in the defensive zone and coughed it up to Andrei Kostitsyn for an easy top corner goal. Clayton Stoner threw two big hits for the only Wild highlights of the first period, along with a fight with Ryan White that was ended much too soon by the officials. The first period ended 2-0, which wasn’t so bad, 2-0 can be surmounted right? Wrong.
The second period gave way to a pure massacre with 4 Canadiens goals. It was the P.K. Subban show at that point as he scored a first goal by dancing around freely in the Wild’s zone and banking the puck off Greg Zanon’s skate and in the net. Then, Sean Avery’s best friend James Wizniewski scored on a two-on-one rush, Travis Moen scored in a defensive mess and P.K. Subban added a wicked slapshot goal to make it 6-0 for the Habs. As you can guess, the friends I was watching this game with were having TONS of fun at my expense.
The third period was more of the same as P.K. Subban topped off his hat trick with yet another early period goal and Tom Pyatt added an 8th goal on a strong wrist shot past Niklas Backstrom, who had replaced Jose Theodore after he allowed 5 goals against his former team. Jose Theodore has always posted horrible numbers against the Canadiens and tonight was no exception, even though he couldn’t really be blamed for any of those goals, as they mostly resulted from horrendous defense. Mikko Koivu was awarded a penalty shot between the two Habs goals in the third period as a result of a Habs defender closing his hand on the puck in the crease and Kaptain K made no mistake, burying a nice backhander past Alex Auld, filling in for Carey Price (thank the Lord) to ruin his shutout bid. That made absolutely no difference in the outcome or the Wild’s play, because they played a terrible all-around game, even though the shots were nearly dead even at 32-31 in favor of the Habs.
The only things we really had to cheer about was Stoner and his two huge hits and his fight with Ryan White and Mikko Koivu’s penalty shot. Although, it’s pretty sad we actually needed no one else to be on the ice but Koivu and Auld to actually get a goal.