Preview: Minnesota Wild unveil new players in Calgary

The Minnesota Wild have new toys, and they’re showing them off tonight Calgary Flames.

Wild at Flames

When: 9 p.m. CT
Where: Scotiabank Saddledome
TV: BSNX, BSWI, SN, HNIC
Radio: KFAN 100.3

John Klingberg and Oskar Sundqvist will make their Wild debuts tonight at the Saddledome, and it will no doubt be interesting to see how head coach Dean Evason deploys both. We’re sure Evason will be rocking his lineup, and what we see tonight isn’t what we’ll see going into the playoffs next month, but hopefully they both get a chance to shine in a very important game for the Wild.

After Nashville Predators and St. Louis Blues decided to forgo their season, the Flames are the only team out of the playoffs in the West still trying to fight their way there. But with the Wild earning at least a point in their last eight games, they have distanced themselves from their opponents tonight in the standings. There are nine points between these two teams, but a Wild win tonight might put them far enough that we can almost say for certain that, barring disaster, the Wild are in the playoffs.

It’s a typical four-point game tonight, because if the Flames earn all two points available tonight, they’ll suddenly be within arm’s reach of taking the Wild down and out of the postseason.

Tonight feels like the first must-win game of the season, and I just got a taste of hockey in the spring.

Designed Wild lineup

Kirill Kaprizov Ryan Hartman Mats Zuccarello
Marcus Johansson Joel Eriksson Ek Matt Boldy
Connor Dewar Frederick Gaudreau Oskar Sundqvist
Mason Shaw Sam Steel Ryan Reaves

Jake Middleton Jared Spurgeon
Alex Goligoski John Klingberg
Calen Addison Matt Dumba

Filip Gustavsson will likely get the start tonight, but if he’s wrong, he’ll play at least one of the upcoming back-to-back games next week.

As for the lineup, there has been no official news on the pairings and lines of the two new guys, but we assume Sundqvist will easily move to the third line where Jordan Greenway was, but Klingberg’s situation is a little different. In the most optimal and current lineup, four out of six defenders are right-handed. If we were to guess which right-hander will end up on the left side, it would be Calen Addison. He’s the most mobile of the four, and he’s not exactly set in his ways. He might just be drawing the short straw.

If they were wrong, they were wrong.

Projected Flames lineup

Dillon Dube Elias Lindholm Tyler Toffoli
Jacob Pelletier Nazem Kadri Jonathan Huberdeau
Andrew Mangiapane Mikael Backlund Blake Coleman
Milan Lucic Trevor Lewis Walker Duehr

Rasmus Andersson MacKenzie Weegar
Chris Tanev by Noah Hanif
Nikita Zadorov Dennis Gilbert

Jakob Markstrom is expected to start for the Flames tonight, with Daniel Vladar as his backup.

The Flames have top-level talent scattered throughout their lineup, but it hasn’t been enough to make a real impact this season, and after making a blockbuster trade for Matthew Tkachuk and letting Johnny Gaudreau leave in free agency, they appear to be in a worse position than before.

Darryl Sutter’s teams like to play this possession game that results in them blocking goals at a very good rate and scoring enough goals to survive. Well, the Flames have allowed the 18th most goals and scored the 16th most goals in the NHL. Just an average team on both ends of the puck this season. They don’t do anything exceptionally well other than being in every game, but are likely to lose because they have an NHL-leading 13 overtime losses. If we just did a binary win-loss record, the Flames would be 27-35 and that’s bad.

Burning questions

Well, what do the new guys look like?

We’re more interested in the Klingbergs fitting this team than the Sundqvists (no offense, Oskar), so we’re wondering if we’re already seeing production from the newest Wild defenseman. He might even top the power play unit and get a kick out of scoring tonight. And of course, it remains to be seen if Sundqvist can replace the Greenways contribution.

Speaking of which, can the power play get back on track?

In the Wilds last six games, they have had more than 21 minutes of the man advantage and have only scored one goal in that span. Fortunately, the 5-on-5 has gone up so it hasn’t been an issue, but can we just make both attacks work? That 5-3 period against Vancouver Canucks earlier this week was very painful to watch.