At the end of yet another loss to the Wild recently, the Avalanche and head coach Patrick Roy decided to goon things up. Cody McLeod made a run at Mikael Granlund in the closing seconds, then got into a fight with Charlie Coyle.

The Wild didn't take too kindly to it — understandably. Our guy Russo wrote this in his postgame blog:

"That's garbage is what it is," Yeo said of McLeod's antics. "You feel it was going that way all game long. They were obviously very emotional all game long. In an emotional type of game, we did a good job of keeping our focus and I really think that was the difference in the end."

Asked what he thought of Roy putting out McLeod, Yeo said, "We've seen the league respond to things like this. There's rules in place to try to prevent things like that and I'm quite certain that they'll take a good long look at that."

It set the stage for what should be a charged-up atmosphere at Xcel Energy Center on Sunday when the two teams play again. Roy, for his part, isn't trying to defuse things. In fact, after practice Friday he doubled down when asked about it the growing rivalry with the Wild and the finish to the most recent game (comments start shortly after the 2:00 mark of that video link).

"Revenge or whatever, it's not part of what we've been doing. If we were talking about revenge, we would have done something way before that when they hurt (Tyson) Barrie. … To me, garbage is what (Matt) Cooke did to Barrie, not what McLeod did at the end of the game."

The reference, of course, was to Cooke's hit on Barrie in last year's playoffs. Minnesota won that series in seven games; Cooke was suspended for seven games.

If Roy is trying to be an even bigger villain in these parts, comments like that certainly will help him succeed.