Wild-Avalanche + Jarome Iginla renews rivalry tonight

Wild and Avs tonight at 8 p.m. on NBC Sports Network and KFAN.

Fox Sports North is having an hour pregame show. I'll be on it around 7:40 p.m.

I'll also be on KFAN at 3:30 p.m. and please join by live chat on startribune.com/wild at 2 p.m.

No better way to jump into this season than against last year's first-round opponent, Colorado. This is the first of two consecutive games against the Avs.

"It's two teams that are going to have same core players for a long time and play a lot of games against each other," Zach Parise said. "The way the playoffs are set up now, we're most likely going to see each other in the playoffs quite a bit, too. It's building and it's getting there and it's good to start the yea this way.

"I guess it's recognized by the league, too. It's a national game."

Said coach Mike Yeo: "We all just want to get going. It's 82 games. We can't make the playoffs with this win tonight."

Fontaine is close, but Yeo said after his glute injury, the Wild wants to make sure there's no chance he could aggravate the injury, and that they want to make sure he gets enough reps to make sure he's up to game speed and his conditioning is OK.

-- Jarome Iginla, the longtime Calgary Flames captain and all-time leading scorer against the Wild and all-time leader against the Wild in just about every offensive category, gets his Avs career started with consecutive games against the opponent he loves to munch on.

"They've always been very disciplined," Iginla said. "I've played a ton against the Wild. They always seem to be very structured, very disciplined and work hard and I don't think that's changed. In the past few years, they've added more skill than maybe they've had in the past. They compete very hard to go with that skill. They're a good team and it'll be a good challenge."

Iginla signed a three-year deal with the Avs July 1. The other team that went hard after him? Minnesota, which ended up signing Thomas Vanek to a three-year deal.

"I was definitely considering it," Iginla said. "A good team, a good hockey city that keeps adding guys and is very competitive."

"It's going to force us to be good," Yeo said. "We know that they're going to be good. We have a lot of respect for that team over there.

"This is not Game 8 of the playoffs here. This is Game 1 of the regular season. What happened last year is last year. We want to leave it behind us as much as they want to leave it behind them."

-- Former Gopher Erik Johnson, who got to eat a home-cooked meal at his folks' house last night, said he took a lot of flak from his Minnesota buddies this past summer for losing to the Wild in the playoffs.

"My response is you should probably cheer for us because if the Wild wins a Cup, you're not going to be invited to any Cup parties. That switches their opinion pretty quick."

--Parise sounded the alarms again that the Wild needs to rid itself of those summer hockey habits that showed up in a lot of the Wild's 3-2-1 preseason.

"Sometimes it does take a regular season game to get that back," Parise said. "That's the thing that'll be the most important thing is to understand how we played and what worked for us and what worked for us last year and how hard we were to play against at the end of the season. There were times … we'd go 10, 12, 14 minutes without giving up a shot on net. That frustrated the other team and made us successful. We can't afford to get too much of a fancy game early in the season.

"We have to be smarter in the regular season than [we were in the preseason]."

What else?

-- Cody Almond has Geneva in his back pocket, but he plans to give Iowa a try first. But he wants a chance to be an NHL player and GM Chuck Fletcher has gotten a couple calls from teams. However, the Wild doesn't want a contract back for Almond. It wants a draft pick. But the teams interested so far want to give up a live, breathing, human player.

-- Nik Backstrom, one of the funniest Wild players, was hysterical when I was shooting the breeze with him this morning about this new referee helmet cam that was debuted last night on TV.

He said I could go with the quote. Once he saw the tweet, the goalie joked, "I'm in deep trouble now. Suddenly I'm going to be the guy that's diving."

-- Speaking of Backstrom, Yeo talked more about giving Darcy Kuemper the first start tonight.

"It's a decision that I'm not going to lose any sleep over because of the way Darcy played. He had a good camp, but it wasn't an easy decision because of the way that Backy performed in training camp."

In the end, Yeo said he evaluated both performances, and the opponent also came into play and how Kuemper played against the Avs at home in the playoffs. "It felt like the right call to make … today."