Posted by After a self-imposed break from the rigors of a long regular season (skiing in VT), I return to a Wild team full of trepidation. Double entendre, er, entendre. The team itself has had four long days to think about the monumental choke job against the Senators last Saturday (when they blew a 3-0 lead to lose 5-3), in what has to be the most ill-timed four-day layoff in team (league?) history. Yet here we are. A closed-door lecture from the GM, a couple light days, one brutal day, and now it’s back at it. Oh, goody.
But, and here’s where it gets good, first up: the Flames.
Yes, those Wild killers are in St. Paul and stand directly in the way of a “get-well” game for the boys in Iron Range Red. To say the Flames have dominated the Wild over the past few years is to dramatically understate reality. The Flames own the Wild. Funny, we were recently talking about how the Red Wings also own the Wild. But the Flames just seem to carry out their ownership of the Wild with more…..domination, if that makes any sense. The Wings, whatever. They’re always the class of the league. They own lots of teams. Getting worked by them is almost expected for a team like the Wild.
But the Flames, though an outstanding team in their own right, have more of an air of flawed hero about them. Their failures to deliver on promise have left indelible pock marks on their fans’ souls over the years. It’s like being owned by the Atlanta Braves of the 90s. It’s one thing to have been owned by the Yankees of that period. At least they went all the way a bunch of times. But the Braves were just good enough to tease you. And to make it smart if they owned you.
As an aside, in the overall fan-rating system of the Northwest Division, being owned by the Flames is more palatable than being owned by the Canucks, whose fans seem to be both cursed by rooting for a team that is almost clinically unable to deliver them unto the promised land and possessed of the understandable enmity and rancor towards fans of other teams that may have had more success than their own – even recent expansion teams and just in the last few years. Oilers fans seem to be pretty high brow, their glory days both recent and glorious enough to put their current struggles into a more macro perspective and thus allow them not to get their undies too bunched up. Avs fans, we’ll just say they’re the NY Post of NW Division fans: they’re all sizzle, no steak (and I can say that having lived in Denver during the seminal Avs years – patiently teaching Avs fans about things like offside and penalty kill – when all they wanted to do was hang Kris Draper in effigy and cheer on Scotty Parker.) Wild fans, in fairness, are the lap dogs of the NW Division, having put up with mediocrity for all these years, just happy to have a team back – though that might be changing now.
Back to the Flames. You know those “Chuck Norris > God” lists that are circulated around the world wide web? Well Wild fans make up those same lists – but switch out Chucky in favor of Jarome Iginla. It’s one thing that he’s just so good, and so clutch. But, when you add in that he’s so humble and seems to be such a good guy, well that’s apparently enough to keep our embittered sports fans gorge from rising at the prospect of Iginla and the Flames crushing the Wild…again. Maybe it’s some vestige of ”Minnesota Nice” from deep down in our subconscious. I can just hear my grandmother saying “That Iginla, he just seems like such a nice man…and he’s a total stud down low, too!”
So, the Wild gets the Flames, and then the Red Wings (and Chicago) over the weekend. And then the Kings – and then The Road Trip starts. It would be hard enough to try to get their mojo back as it is, without having to play the two teams that dominate the Wild more than any other teams in the league in a row. Would it surprise anyone if this is as close as the Wild gets to the top eight for the rest of the season?
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