Wild spends day revisiting the Boudreau basics

BOSTON – In the midst of three games in four nights on the road, Monday would normally be a day on which a coach would give his team the day off or hold a very optional practice.

But at TD Garden in preparation for Tuesday's game against the Boston Bruins, Bruce Boudreau held a remedial session of sorts. Once again, he tried to jam certain facets of his system into the brains of his Wild players.

"We had to go over some points that I thought we were just starting to get away from," the Wild coach said.

Winless in the first two games of a four-game road trip and coming off a 3-0 homestand that still featured some convoluted-looking hockey, it is abundantly clear Wild players are caught in between Boudreau's new system and the one Mike Yeo deployed for much of five years.

Everything is different, from the way the Wild forechecks more aggressively to changes in the way the Wild plays in the neutral zone, defensive zone and on faceoffs.

"You do something for so long and now you've got to change," defenseman Ryan Suter said. "It's all good stuff. It's all stuff we all agree with and buy into. It's just when you're out there, you try not to think too much. You want to just be able to react, and I think we're thinking right now a lot.

"When we do what Bruce wants, we're really good at it. But it's the two or three times a game where we forget what we're supposed to do or one guy is doing the old thing and the rest of the guys are doing the new thing. That's why we're playing in spurts."

"We've been forechecking a certain way for 4½ years, some guys more than that," Zach Parise said. "Now our forecheck is different. Me personally, there have been certain plays where I'm so used to being more passive on the wall that I find myself crossed up.

"I still find myself sometimes reminding myself halfway up the ice that I've got to start to skate, I've got to get up there. I can't throw on the brakes. And that's a big difference. There are other smaller adjustments that are different all over the ice."

Parise likes Boudreau's way of forechecking better, but "if the first two guys aren't there or aren't doing it right, then everyone's caught in between, and that's why I think our game's been so inconsistent.

"When you do it right, you get the puck back a lot more. But a lot of times, we're not doing it right."

Boudreau didn't realize how many big or subtle changes there actually were between the way he wants things done and the way Yeo did.

He finds the Wild's way in the past was largely about playing it safe, "but if everyone is doing their job," especially without the puck, "it should still be very safe. Rather than all pulling back and fighting the battle in your end all the time, we'd like to fight the battle in the neutral zone or even their end."

The Wild is 3-2-1. Boudreau, whose Anaheim Ducks last season gave up the fewest goals in the NHL, is not used to a team averaging 3.17 goals- against a game.

"I think there's five [games] now where we've allowed 30 shots or more," Boudreau said. "But these are growing pains."

Suter believes the Wild is close.

"I remember in the preseason games, I was thinking, 'Oh no, what's going on here?' " he said.

So the hangover between systems may explain why the Wild has looked so spotty in games. It has yet to play a complete 60-minute game, although Parise thinks that term is thrown around too loosely.