On March 6, the Wild was thrashed by Dallas 6-3 at the Xcel Energy Center, the team's eighth loss in 10 games. In a news conference following the game, the coach and several players used the word "fragile'' at least a dozen times while describing their team.
Three Sundays later, on March 27, the Wild defeated Colorado, the winningest team in the NHL, 3-2 in overtime for a six-game winning streak. In the postgame news conferences, no one used, or needed to consider using, the word "fragile.''
Credit General Manager Bill Guerin, who has proved repeatedly that he can read a locker room and give a team precisely what it needs.
Credit goalie Cam Talbot, who played poorly enough to prompt a trade for Marc-Andre Fleury yet recovered from his midseason slump in time to become a key to the Wild's latest winning streak.
Credit the perpetual overachievers, like Jared Spurgeon, Joel Eriksson Ek and Ryan Hartman, without whom the Wild wouldn't have been in a position to be panicked over a slump.
Just don't forget to credit Kirill Kaprizov, the best all-around player in franchise history.
On Saturday night against Columbus, Kaprizov scored two goals and reached 80 points, leaving him three shy of Marian Gaborik's franchise record. Sunday against Colorado, he was typically dangerous and buried a power-play goal off a beautiful feed from Hartman for the Wild's first goal.
His backchecking led to the Wild's second goal, and he contributed a pass that did not earn him an assist on Kevin Fiala's game-winner in overtime.
Gaborik had two and only two exceptional skills — skating speed and a surgical wrist shot, which he combined to become an unstoppable open-ice scorer. That Kaprizov could break his record while playing a more-well-rounded game is all the information you need to crown him as the franchise's best player.
Kaprizov is better all-around player than Gaborik. He's a far more skilled player than Zach Parise. He's too skilled to be compared to Mikko Koivu.
He is durable, tough, a brilliant passer, a frequent finisher … and he might be elevating the best-constructed team in franchise history.
The Wild's one miracle playoff run was a Rocky/Rudy story enabled by ingenious coaching.
This team could make that kind of a run without having it feel like a fairy tale.
On March 6, the Wild sounded, by the end of the night, like a group in need of mass therapy. Maybe there's a lesson there.
Most professional sports teams that go through a potentially devastating slump either try to deny its existence, or allow it to damage their confidence.
The Wild handled its slump in a thoroughly modern way. Players admitted how troubled they were by it, and even used a word no team wants as its label — "fragile'' — without shame. What sounded like surrender then now seems more like a head-clearing admission, and a request for help.
Which Guerin provided.
"I think we were going through a bit of the dog days there,'' Matt Dumba said of the reaction to the Dallas loss. "Just that grind. Now the building's electric, Billy's made some trades here, and our team has come together, knowing we have something special here, and we have to work it into existence. That's what we're seeing now.''
Dumba called Kaprizov and Fiala "little bulls.'' He called watching Kaprizov "intoxicating.''
That's not hyperbole. The NHL is filled with muck-it-up, dump-the-puck, crash-the-net players who have to make up for an acknowledged lack of skill. Because handling a puck with a slightly curved stick on ice as people try to concuss you is difficult.
Kaprizov is the rare player who can make the puck dance, and cling to the stick, and snake through crowds, and shoot a disc into a disc-sized area of net.
He is also the opposite of fragile.
"I'm going to walk back the fragile thing,'' Wild coach Dean Evason said. "Because my Mom gave me [grief]. Fragile means you think we can break, and I didn't think we could break. I just thought that we lacked a little bit of confidence when things didn't go our way.''
We can take the Wild at its word.
The team was fragile.
And Kaprizov is, indeed, intoxicating.
