Something wild: with a quick start this season, a budding superstar in Marian Gaborik, and a proven winner behind the bench in Jacques Lemaire, Minnesota has broken from the expansion pack

Hockey Digest, March, 2003 by John Kreiser

THESE ARE WILD TIMES IN Minnesota.

The nation's most hockey-mad state is in the third year of a love affair with its second NHL team. And the Wild are reciprocating with the best showing by a third-year team since the Florida Panthers made the Stanley Cup Finals in 1996.

Despite having the NHL's lowest budget (about $22 million, the combined salaries of Jaromir Jagr and Keith Tkachuk or only about a third as much as free-spenders like the New York Rangers), the Wild are among the league's biggest surprises. Three months into the season, their 19-11-7-1 record was good enough for second place in the Northwest Division and had them on target for their first playoff berth. They had a decent lead in. the points race over playoff perennials like the Colorado Avalanche and the San Jose Sharks.

Amazingly, the Wild are winning with basically the same cast that produced just 73 points last season--not a bad showing for a second-year team, but nothing to indicate that a breakout season was on the horizon.

For their first two seasons, the low-budget Wild won largely by boring the other team to death--playing coach Jacques Lemaire's neutral zone trap almost exclusively and relying on the odd break to get enough goals to win. That formula was good enough to make the Wild competitive on most nights, but not to win consistently. With the NHL's highly publicized crackdown on obstruction this season, the Wild, as a team that relied on the trap, were expected to be among the teams most severely affected.

But Lemaire's trap is not designed to be solely a defensive system. When executed correctly, the trap can produce lots of scoring opportunities by creating turnovers that let the trapping team end up with odd-man rushes. It was the formula that made the New Jersey Devils one of the NHL's highest-scoring teams in the mid-1990s, when they capped the revival of the franchise by winning the Stanley Cup in 1995.

"No one knows more about the game than Jacques," says Dallas Stars forward Bill Guerin, who cut his hockey teeth playing under Lemaire in New Jersey. "He was great for me. He gets his point across and gets his players to be disciplined. In the defensive zone, no one is better."

And lost in all the hubbub over the Wild's trap is one basic fact: Minnesota is among the fastest teams in the NHL By relying on smaller, quicker forwards, Lemaire has put together a team that's among the least-penalized in the NHL, averages nearly one more power play per game than the opposition, and is in the upper half of the league in scoring.

"A lot of people don't know that we're really quick," says goaltender Manny Fernandez, who's combined with Dwayne Roloson to keep the Wild among the NHL's top five in least goals allowed. "There are a lot of guys who can really move out there. Against opponents' top lines, we put our class guys out there so there won't be any grabbing and holding. If you can't hold anybody, you've got to be quicker. We try to match those players with the fastest skaters we've got"

And unlike some other expansion cities, where hockey has had the staying power of a hothouse rose, the Wild play before some of the NHL's most loyal fans. The team sells out the 18,064-seat Xcel Center in St. Paul for every game and has a season-ticket base of more than 16,000 with another 2,000 waiting to get in. Not bad for an area that Norm Green, former owner of the Minnesota North Stars, abandoned in 1993 for a pot of gold in Dallas, leaving "The State Of Hockey" (as a banner at the Xcel Center proclaims) without a team for seven years before the Wild arrived in 2000.

Luckily for those fans, Lemaire answered the call when Wild GM Doug Risebrough, Lemaire's former Montreal teammate, went looking for the right man to guide his club. Lemaire's coaching skills can make a team competitive even with poor players. Given a smattering of talent, he can get a club into the playoffs. So don't expect the Wild to have any kind of a second-half swoon.

Lemaire, who played and coached in the hockey crucible that is Montreal and then led New Jersey to its first Cup, is delighted to be in an area where hockey is appreciated but also where he doesn't have to cope with as many of the trappings pings of fan adulation.

"In Montreal, they knew us so much, it was like we were their brothers," he says. "Here, they know us, but they're a little more reserved. I like this a lot better--no doubt."

From the start, Lemaire and Risebrough knew that with a limited budget, they would have to shop smart and draft well. They've done both.

Among the useful pieces they've found on the discard pile are players like Sergei Zholtok and Antti Laaksonen, who were languishing in the minors until coming to Minnesota, as well as twentysomething European players like Filip Kuba and Lubomir Sekeras. Lemaire also made a couple of smart deals with his old New Jersey boss, Lou Lamoriello, to bring in young defensemen Willie Mitchell and Brad Bombardir.

The Wild's rising star, though, is left wing Marian Gaborik, the franchise's first-ever draft pick in 2000. The 20-year-old Slovak sniper, a 30-goal scorer last season, is on pace for bigger things--he was the second player to hit the 20-goal mark this season and was on target to make a run at 50 goals.