Game Notes
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Toeing the Line of the Pest “Role”
F Ryan Hartman can and has been a very effective player for the Minnesota Wild. You can just look at last season when he had career highs in goal, assists, shots, shot % and pretty much across the board. Part of that is because he played a lot of last season with Kirill Kaprizov and Mats Zuccarello but there is no reason he can’t get back to that kind of production. He’s a great player with an excellent shot and great vision.
He started this season playing on that top line but because the Wild struggled out of the gate, they made a change and he was put on the Identity Line with Marcus Foligno & Joel Eriksson Ek when they tried F Tyson Jost on the top line. He then ended up missing a month and a half due to an injury. He had just 5 points (1 goal, 4 assists) in 9 games at that time. He returned on December 18th and he started to produce more with 7 points (4 goals, 3 assists) in 8 games through the OTL in Buffalo. He was also a +5 in plus/minus and did not register a minus game in those 8 games.
The Wild were 22-13-3 (W-L-OTL) at that point then… in the next 8 games starting with the January 8th home game against St. Louis, a 3-0 loss, they went 3-4-1. In those games, Ryan Hartman had just 2 assists and was a -7 and only 2 of those games he wasn’t a minus in the plus/minus column.
One of Ryan Hartman’s career-high stats from last season was also Penalty Minutes when he had 95 in 82 games so just over 1 penalty minute per game (1.16 or 1:09). This season he had 47 minutes in 25 games so just under 2 penalty minutes per game (1.88 or 1:53). That’s a big jump and, obviously, that has been a pretty big problem so far this season. It’s not that he’s taking penalties. It’s the penalties he’s taking. He’s taken a lot of penalties because his emotions got the best of him.
We can say the officials made bad calls but the rules haven’t changed much, if at all, from 2021-22 to 2022-23 to give him any slack for it.
He knows it and has said it in multiple postgame or other interviews. They don’t want him to change his game. His role is that of a pest, a player who can get under the skin of the opponent with his physical play and his…uhh.. vocabulary. He just has to be in control of it and not let the opponent goad him into a retaliatory situation. The officials have been known to call the retaliation as a penalty the majority of the time. That’s not going to change.
Being a pest is knowing exactly what you’re doing the whole time and knowing how to use it to help your team by either getting them off their game because they become concerned about what you’re doing or by making them retaliate to what you’re doing.
You could call it…
Pest Control.
“Pest Control, this is The Clutter speaking. Are your Pests out of control?”
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The Wild Identity
The Wild have talent and they can win some games because of that talent but their identity and why they win most games is because of how hard they compete and that starts with number 97. He battles all game long and wins probably 97% of those battles.
You cannot win consistently on talent alone. (Right, Herb?) Talent is “look what I can do.” Compete Level is how hard I do it, how bad I want it and how much I hate to lose!
“I hate losing more than I even wanna win.”
That’s why Compete Level is the first thing scouts look for when they’re evaluating players. If how hard a player competes is a question, there’s no reason to find out the answer.
Look at how hard the Colorado Avalanche competed to win the 2022 Stanley Cup and they had A LOT of talent. They figured out how hard they needed to compete over the 2-3 or more seasons when their season ended without anything to show for it and, NO, no team celebrates a Division or Conference Championship! They don’t get together 10, 20, or 25 years later to say, “Hey, remember when we won the division 10 years ago?”
This is why the coaches and front office of the Wild said everyone, including themselves, needed to be more accountable this season. That is how you take the next step. You don’t keep doing the same thing over and over again and hope you do better. You work on your game, your skills and look at any opportunity to get better physically and mentally.
How much will that play into how this 2022-23 Minnesota Wild season ends?
Could that 3-game losing streak end up being a turning point for this season?
If the Wild play the way they know they can play and compete the way they know they have to compete, the sky is the limit!
We’ve probably said this many times but there’s a saying about talent and working hard:
“Hard Work Beats Talent When Talent Doesn’t Work Hard!”
That’s a great statement, right? But it’s incomplete because it looks at talent and working hard as single things that oppose each other like you can’t have both so complete the statement with:
“If You Combine Talent and Hard Work, You Can Become Unbeatable!”
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Do you like the Stadium Series Jerseys?
They’re not bad.
What about the All-Star Jerseys?
Meh! They look nice but those colors are…Not Good!
––––– CP –––––
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