It may have been Buffalo, but Wild gets much-needed victory

Hey, it's easy to discount tonight's 6-3 win over the Buffalo Sabres as meaningless because it came against Buffalo.

Even Sabres coach Ted Nolan is exasperated with his bad team, which in all-out lottery pick mode. For a third consecutive game, the Sabres gave up a half-dozen, so this isn't a good team and Nolan ripped into some of the cluelessness defensively after the game.

But imagine if the Wild lost.

So that's why I rolled my eyes at some of the "who cares?" tweets after the game, that the Wild only beat a junior team (no disrespect to junior teams, of course). The Wild did its job – it won a game it so desperately needed to win just to dial down the temperature for one night by snapping a four-game losing streak.

The Wild maybe even overcame a couple mental hurdles by not completely freaking out when it gave up a goal 63 seconds in and another one when Darcy Kuemper gave up a second goal on a second shot 10 seconds after the Wild took a 2-1 lead. That would be all she wrote for Kuemper, but Kyle Brodziak and Nino Niederreiter (first career hat trick, 18^th in Wild history, 10^th player) responded and Niklas Backstrom was solid in net by stopping 25 of 26 shots for his first home win since Jan. 4 in his first home appearance since Jan. 11.

"It's huge for us," said Ryan Carter, who had a goal and assist and was part of great fourth line with Brodziak and Justin Fontaine. "I don't care what the opponent says or what their record is on any given night. It's difficult to win in this league. It was nice to get that. I think we did it in good fashion, too. They got ahead early and we fought back and got the lead. They came back again, we stuck with it. That's the kind of game I think we needed."

The win came after coach Yeo scrambled all four lines in large part to spark low-scoring centermen Mikael Granlund, Mikko Koivu and Erik Haula.

Yeo said Granlund needed to play with two workers (Granlund had a good game and Coyle had a great game) and Haula needed to play with two creative, offensive guys. Yeo also hoped their speed would help Vanek.

"We kid about it, but we don't just roll the dice and see what comes up here. It may appear that way sometimes," Yeo said, jokingly this morning.

For one night it worked. Niederreiter, who now leads the team with seven goals, scored his first-period goals from the blue paint. Yeo indicated he has been trying to convince Niederreiter that he has got a good enough shot to score off the rush (he proved that in Game 7 last year), but where he's going to make his mark in this league is by driving the net and being hard to contain by the blue.

For one night, Niederreiter listed to his coach.

The Wild got two power-play goals (wow) for a second time this season and now the Wild hopes to build on it in Dallas, where the Wild is 1-14-5 since March 2003. The Wild is 2-6 on the road and is 0 for 29 on the road on the power play.

"I was confident that it hit my stick," Carter said. "And he told me on the ice, too, he was going to go look at it upstairs. I knew if they looked at it, it was going to be a good goal.

"That was a quick play. I don't know how I thought of it or why I did it. It worked out. There's a million things I could do now thinking about it. Just stand there and let it hit the ground and knock it in or something. I'm glad it worked out."

It was Carter's second goal in two games and Yeo loved the play of his fourth line tonight.

"It's a good reminder for everybody how they did it," Yeo said of their six-point game. "When you meet with the lines and you're talking about what their role is, what their identity is, that line's gotten a lot of offense for us and there's been different people on it at different times this year, but it's a good reminder that it doesn't always have to be pretty, it doesn't always have to be fancy. It still feels the same. If you score a pretty tic-tac-toe, off-the-rush goal or if you score one off the forecheck in the offensive zone and go to the net and getting a rebound and cross-checking the thing into the net – that's the first time I've ever seen that (laughing) – but those guys did a great job."

Carter said of the fourth line that has dried up since Matt Cooke's injury: "If you can chip in, it's nice. It's good to get scoring throughout. At the end of the night, we needed that. It was important."

For a guy who missed five games with a shoulder injury, he logged 29:27 because Yeo couldn't ease him in because of illnesses to Jonas Brodin and Marco Scandella. Just impressive.

"To get out there was good. Now we have to look forward to Dallas," Spurgeon said. "I just tried to get back into it as fast as possible. Playing with Suts (Ryan Suter) is pretty easy to do that. I just tried to keep it simple.

"I was able to get back on the ice about three days after I got hurt. They did a great job keeping me in shape. Obviously that's a lot more fun than what I was doing before."

Kuemper has given up goals in his past seven starts. His save percentage is down to .908.

On pulling Kuemper today, Yeo said, "I just felt that was a change that was needed. This is not by any means … I wouldn't have started him if I felt that we've been losing games because of him. In fact I told him that yesterday. But that was just something that I felt that we needed to do at that time."

Josh Harding may be looking at a conditioning stint soon. The Iowa Wild play three in three next weekend, so perhaps Harding can get two games.

If the Wild keeps three goalies on the roster, that means one less position player. The Wild obviously can't risk waivers on Kuemper and if he plays in two more games, he would require waivers to get to the minors.

So like I said, it'll be interesting to see how the Wild handles this now. Do they ride Backstrom for a few games to see how Harding respond or does it not mess with its goaltending and just treat Kuemper's contract situation like business as usual?

OK, that's it for me. Big win from the proverbial sense. It was needed. Now onto Dallas.