Darcy Kuemper exits early again as the Wild rallies, then blows third-period lead to Anaheim

Zach Parise could have come out after tonight's 5-4 loss to Anaheim and said, "Told ya."

Just kidding.

But ironically one game after the Wild's leading scorer angered some by asking if booing fans would have preferred the Wild scored four power-play goals against Montreal but lost, the Wild's power play nearly ripped the roof off Xcel Energy Center tonight when Mikko Koivu and Parise connected power-play goals 11 seconds apart in the second period.

Those power-play goals helped the Wild storm back from a 3-0 hole. Jonas Brodin tied the score at 3-3 late in the second period, then Justin Fontaine snapped a 15-game goal drought 2:07 into the third.

But Darcy Kuemper, pulled in two of his previous three home starts, made it 3 for 4 when he gave up the tying goal to Tim Jackman 90 seconds later, then the go-ahead goal and eventual winner to Matt Beleskey less than five minutes after that.

Now, to answer the question I received 100 times (guessing) on Twitter after the game, Josh Harding has played one minor-league game in 11 months. He is not ready. He is expected to play at Charlotte on Saturday and Monday after stopping 50 of 54 shots in a 5-4 shootout loss last Sunday at San Antonio, but it's the Kuemper and Niklas Backstrom show right now for the time being.

It'll be interesting to see if Yeo allows Kuemper the net Tuesday against the Islanders because Yeo did his absolute best to tiptoe around any Kuemper questions in the postgame. He has bounced back before, but he only has to keep bouncing back because he keeps having games like tonight.

And he did. After the game, Kuemper said he didn't feel like he was fighting the puck (which he wasn't) and got beat with good shots. But he said he can't be letting in five and said it was tough giving up that tying goal to Jackman after the Wild worked so hard to rally back from a 3-0 hole and take a one-goal lead.

It was the third time in four starts Kuemper was yanked at Xcel Energy Center, and in those starts he has a .755 save percentage and 5.37 goals-against average. But he said he feels it's just a "coincidence," that he didn't really have a chance to do anything against Buffalo because he was out of the net on two goals on two shots so the Wild could change momentum, that tonight he felt fine and that only the L.A. game did he feel he was fighting it.

So he said, mentally he feels fine right now.

Tonight was only the Wild's third regulation loss in the past 11 games. But it is three points back of Winnipeg, which keeps on winning somehow. So do teams like Nashville and Calgary, so the Wild best get on a real run because it seems in this conference, you don't gain ground when you win but you surely lose ground when you lose.

A perfect example is how the Wild was 7-2-1 in its previous 10 and not for more than a few minutes did it get into the top-8 and it actually somehow dropped from ninth to 10.

The Wild's response came after an awful first period in which Ryan Kesler and Jakob Silfverberg gave Anaheim, the top team in the Western Conference, a 2-0 lead despite losing leading goal scorer Corey Perry to a lower-body injury after a Keith Ballard hip check.

Some Ducks fans felt it was clipping because Ballard seemed to get Perry across or below the knee, which is the definition of clipping in the rulebook. There was no call.

But how bad was the opening 20 for the Wild? When your only two scoring chances are provided by fourth-line wingers Ryan Carter (no points in the past nine games) and Justin Fontaine (no goals since Oct. 28 before Friday), it's safe to say nobody was running well.

In fact, other than one shot by Koivu, nobody from the Wild's first, second or third line or any of the six defensemen had a shot.

But then the Wild rallied and got jolted by the fans before taking a 4-3 lead. Parise didn't feel like the Wild got complacent and celebrated too early after the Fontaine goal, but he wasn't about to single out the goaltending either.

"We rallied back, but there's no reason that any of us should have a good feeling about that. We lost the game," Yeo said.

The one positive of the game was Koivu and Parise scoring 11 seconds apart on the power play, so the hope is the Wild can build off of that while keeping the other parts of its game firm.

But the Wild can't afford Ryan Suter to be out long. Jared Spurgeon and Marco Scandella were each minus-3 tonight, and Spurgeon has had a run of tough games lately. He is minus-8 in his past five games. Nino Niederreiter was also minus-3 tonight and Thomas Vanek was minus-2.