Like the players, Andrew Brunette is frustrated.

One of the most popular players in Wild history, "Bruno" is the assistant coach in charge of the Wild power play. In fact, he went from being one of Mike Yeo's eyes in the sky last season to being on the bench this season so he could make real-time, hands-on adjustments to the power play.

The rare maneuver of having a third assistant on the bench was due to a middle-of-the-pack power play deemed by Yeo as not good enough. But if the Wild ranked 16th again this season, it would undoubtedly sit higher than ninth place in the Western Conference standings.

After 23 games, the Wild's power play ranks 29th in the NHL, scoring seven times on 73 chances for a 9.4 percent success rate. On the road, the Wild's power play has scored once on 42 chances (2.4 percent).

"I've scratched my head and think a lot about it," Brunette said. "To me, you just want to go to bed feeling you've prepared your guys as much as you possibly can. If you can do that, I think you sleep a little better. But there are nights, I admit, where I think maybe I haven't done enough. It's frustrating."

Brunette scored 114 power-play goals in his career. He knows a thing or two about the power play and has been through great ones, bad ones, hot stretches and bad stretches.

He says the problems on the ice aren't personnel or systematic, but more so because of frustration has infiltrated the players.

Zach Parise, who scored his first power-play goal Saturday against St. Louis after finishing fourth in the NHL last season with 14, said as such after a recent loss at Tampa Bay. He said it was becoming "repetitive" where players were "sitting around and waiting for someone else to do something. We don't support each other very well. When you're scoring, you do that stuff naturally. When you're not, we stand around, we look at each other, we don't support each other, we don't retrieve pucks."

The Wild scored seven power-play goals in the preseason, which was a misleading statistic because regular penalty killers don't often see that duty, and certainly don't sacrifice their bodies as they do in the regular season.

"You're like, 'Where are those easy back-door, tap-in goals that we got?' " Brunette said. "It gets harder and maybe we tinkered a little too much with it. But that's just human nature to change guys here and there to try to find something that works."

The Wild has talented players on both power-play units. The first unit right now consists of Parise, Mikko Koivu, Thomas Vanek, Jason Pominville and Ryan Suter. That's $34 million worth of players that should be able to make enough plays to score goals. The second unit right now consists of Nino Niederreiter (four of the Wild's seven power-play goals), Mikael Granlund, Charlie Coyle (Jason Zucker is about to see more power-play time), Jared Spurgeon and Marco Scandella (Jonas Brodin may start interchanging again now that he's healthy).

The Wild still lacks a big shot from the point, and hopes Matt Dumba eventually can provide that.

"When we're at our best, especially the first half of last year, we moved the puck real quick and we moved," Brunette said. "We had a lot of movement. The puck was moving, we were moving.

"I think we started off this year like that. But when the puck's not going in, you slow down a little bit and either you start trying to [force plays] or make individual plays and everybody has their ideas of what should be done. Sometimes that's detrimental. We're out of sync."

Behind the scenes, players have done so much talking to try to repair things they're almost in each other's way.

"They're trying to do it positively and grab it by the horns to fix it, but it's got to be done collectively and as a group to get on the same page," Brunette said.

"It's just a matter of getting back to what we do when we're at our best. They'll find a little bit of magic. We'll figure it out."

Scandella fined

Scandella was fined $2,755.38 for an illegal check to the head of St. Louis' T.J. Oshie in Saturday's game. It was the maximum fine (half-day pay) for a player who does not have a hearing and is not a repeat offender.