Wild looks to somehow beat the Ducks; Dubnyk on his game; Prosser in for Folin

The Wild had a short but sweet practice this morning at Xcel Energy Center in preparation for Saturday's game against the Anaheim Ducks. It's the first of back-to-back 5 p.m. games, in fact, as the Wild flies to Winnipeg afterward to play the Jets on Sunday.

Devan Dubnyk will start against the Ducks and Darcy Kuemper will start at the Jets.

Coach Mike Yeo admitted the Wild talked about maybe starting Dubnyk in Winnipeg because he was so good in the second of back-to-backs last year (five goals allowed in five consecutive victories in that scenario to close the season), but Yeo wants Dubnyk to get into a rhythm after he plays and also he said Kuemper's been good in Winnipeg (Last Dec. 29, Kuemper stopped 28 of 30 there for a win).
Speaking of the jolly Dubnyk, he's breaking in some new Bauer pads that he plans to unveil next week. The top is one piece of foam (no stitching, not separate pieces) and they're much lighter (lighter coloring, too, almost like the printing press in Thailand ran out of ink, he said) and buckles that he likes rather than Velcro.

He thinks he'll slide better and things like that.

Dubnyk was jovial as always today dissecting his game and explaining things like why and how he blew his edge last night on the first goal against. That was explained on last night's blog.

He said jokingly that he's been psycho-analyzing his game because "you guys keep telling me my stats" stink. He has a 2.81 goals-against average, .896 save percentage but most importantly a 4-1 record.

He laughed and said his buddy texted him and asked him to raise his frigin' save percentage already because he drafted Dubnyk in his fantasy league. "I texted him back, 'I didn't ask you to pick me in your league and write me again when you have a save percentage,'" Dubnyk said, laughing. "He's in oil and gas. I don't text him and evaluate his work."

What else?

Nate Prosser will be the lone lineup change against the Ducks, whose only win is still against Minnesota after getting crushed last night in Nashville. Prosser will play for Christian Folin. Not sure if there's anything wrong with Folin. He only logged 8:08 of ice time last night against Columbus (seemed like more) and was off the ice very early today. Just seemed odd because most the players stayed on the ice long after practice ended to work, and usually Folin is one of them. So maybe something's up with him health-wise.

Nino Niederreiter also practiced today. Like I noted last night on Twitter, Yeo, too, felt Niederreiter was "laboring early, but as [his injury] loosened up, he seemed fine to me. No problems."

The Ducks have beaten the Wild 10 of the past 11 meetings and six in a row in Minnesota all by one goal. In fact, in the Zach Parise-Ryan Suter era, those are all the games between these two teams – 10 of 11 losses overall and six straight in Minnesota.

I'm writing about that in Saturday's paper, as well as the Parise-Mikael Granlund-Jason Pominville line, which I also kinda wrote about in today's game notebook on startribune.com/wild. Parise is tied for the league lead with six goals, yet the line is hardly clicking on all cylinders. Pominville is still goalless despite the third-most shot attempts on the team (interestingly, Jason Zucker leads the team in shot attempts and has no goals, too).