Big bounceback win tonight by the Wild as it scored three in the first and held on to beat the Ducks 3-2 to move into the top spot in the Northwest Division for the first time since Dec. 4, 2008.
As coach Mike Yeo said, the Wild won't win anything at the end of the season for being first in the division on Nov. 14, but the Wild passed a very early test here in the 2011-12 campaign.
The Wild was humiliated last night up the road in L.A. It's also smarting with a bunch of injuries (the latest being Guillaume Latendresse and Marco Scandella) and banged-up bodies.
So Mike Yeo called a meeting this morning and wanted to know how the Wild would respond.
Yeo pregame: "These are the challenges we face and this is how you become a playoff team. How do you respond to games like last night? How do you respond when things aren't going well? How do you respond when you have guys out of the lineup? To me, the biggest thing is developing a winners attitude, developing a winners culture here where you don't accept last night. We can't accept this. We can't accept that of ourselves. That's not who we are. And when you start to view yourself a certain way, when you start to believe, 'we're winners,' you do the things that winners do everyday."
Also pregame: "Maybe two weeks from now, we'll look at this and say, 'Thank goodness we got our butts whipped in L.A. and got reminded what we have to do night in and night out to be a successful hockey team."
Yeo said 90 minutes before the game, "I absolutely can't wait to see how we're going to respond."
This guy felt the Wild would show its character and leadership tonight, and the Wild certainly showed that in the first period where it absolutely dominated the Ducks and built a 3-0 lead on goals by Kyle Brodziak, Matt Cullen and Jared Spurgeon.