The Wild will open the exhibition season tonight against the St. Louis Blues with a fairly full lineup that includes 10 regular forwards and four regular defensemen, plus roster hopefuls Cody Almond, Robbie Earl, Marco Scandella and Justin Falk. Niklas Backstrom will play two periods, Anton Khudobin one.
The game isn't televised, so for in-game updates and some play-by-play and tidbits, be sure to follow me at twitter.com/russostrib.
It's the longest active sellout streak in the NHL and third-longest recorded sellout streak in NHL history behind Colorado (487) and Detroit (452). Technically, the league only counts sellout streaks involving regular-season and postseason because most teams don't sell out the preseason, so some may debate that the Wild's sellout streak remains intact until it fails to sell out a home game in the regular season, which likely will happen early.
But the Wild, if it fails to sell out tonight or one of the remaining two exhibition games, will consider the streak snapped, I'm told.
I had lunch earlier this month with Craig Leipold, and here was the quote by the Wild owner on this anticipated subject:
"We recognize that we missed the playoffs the last two years. We recognize the economy is such that's it's just a tough time to ask people to make the financial commitment that we asked of them year in and year out. As a result, we're having a little bit of hiccup in our ticket sales. We hope we can still sell out every game. We think there will probably be some games, some Tuesday and Thursday games earlier in the year when there are other things going on in this market, that cause people not to come down. And if we don't sell out those games, fine. We just move on to the next night and work on the next sellout streak."
As for the news from the morning skate,
-- Coach Todd Richards talked a lot about Nick Schultz, the veteran defenseman who looks solid in camp and looks to rebound from an up and down year last year. Richards said he felt responsible for a lot of Schultz's struggles after so much talk of a more offensive team from the back end. In other words, Schultz's specialty is defense, so he should be used more like a shutdown defenseman, or as I always label him, a matchup defenseman. I've got to look it up, but I unearthed a stat this summer that Schultz had I believe the fourth-most ice time shorthanded of any defenseman on the team. That made very little sense to me. I'll write more about that in tomorrow's paper after a good conversation I had this morning with both Richards and especially Schultz.