Wild, known for comebacks, requires far too many

The Wild's players reminded us who they are on Sunday afternoon. They made a hockey game thrilling, but only after playing lethargically enough to get booed off the ice after two periods.

That has been their pattern for too long. Last season, they needed a new goalie to jump-start a dead battery of a team. This year, they needed a new coach. Sunday, they needed to fall behind by four goals in an elimination game at home before they started playing with the kind of gumption that should define a team lacking superstars.

The Wild's enervating comeback fell short and it lost 5-4 to the Dallas Stars, falling 4-2 in the best-of-seven series, and while it is the nature of players to celebrate a comeback, what should be remembered is that they positioned themselves to require one.

This is a team that made the playoffs with a mediocre 87 points, that lost its last five regular-season games and its first two playoff games before rallying. So often the Wild plays just well enough to be able to cite bad luck as the cause of its woes, but hockey luck usually favors the skilled and the diligent and the Wild too often failed in those categories this year.

Wild owner Craig Leipold sounded enthusiastic on Thursday when he said Chuck Fletcher will keep his job as general manager, but Fletcher has to know how difficult the job will be.

The Wild's supposed growth chart now looks like a bell curve. After losing in the first round in 2013 and winning one playoff series in 2014 and 2015, the Wild again was eliminated in the first round this season. The arrow is no longer necessarily pointing up for this group. It's up to Fletcher to make this team deeper, tougher, more potent and less fickle.

The Wild's two franchise players, Zach Parise and Ryan Suter, are 31, not old but in athletic middle age. Parise has a back injury. Suter played well on defense this year but again was a liability on the power play.

Interim coach John Torchetti coaxed bursts of dynamic play from the Wild but did not tame the team's mercurial ways and is unlikely to be back. If Torchetti is dismissed or reassigned, for the fourth time Fletcher will be choosing a new leader.

Given an opportunity to praise Torchetti after the game on Sunday, Suter found a way not to mention Torchetti's name or offer an endorsement. Torchetti probably needed Suter to knock down a few doors to have a chance to keep the job. That doesn't seem likely.

Fletcher will have to refurbish a roster that is heavy on overpaid veterans and unproductive youngsters. The money he could have spent on someone like Kyle Okposo is already being paid to Jason Pominville and Thomas Vanek. It will require a deft touch to buy out someone like Vanek and replace him with a superior player. If Fletcher can't make a dramatic move, why would anyone expect this team to perform differently next season?

"We got close but not enough,'' Mikko Koivu said. "I guess that's the story of our season.''

"It's tough to end it,'' goalie Devan Dubnyk said, "on a bounce like that.''

The Wild could obsess over misfortune or ask why they so often find themselves victimized by it. Had this team played with desperation in the first two periods on Sunday or avoided franchise-altering slumps the past two years, it may not have found itself obsessing about randomness.

If it is true that you make your own luck, the Wild got what it deserved on Sunday, following two periods of awful hockey and a season of regression.