Back home and back to work. The Minnesota Wild hosts the Dallas Stars for Game 3 of the First Round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs tonight at 8:30 on TNT, truTV, HBO Max,\u00a0FanDuel Sports Network and KFAN FM 100.3. After splitting in Dallas and stealing home-ice advantage for the time being, Minnesota will look to go up 2-1 in the series tonight. The two games in Dallas came with bumps and bruises for Minnesota, as it played without Mats Zuccarello in Game 2 and Yakov Trenin exited just three minutes into the contest after a hard open-ice hit from Colin Blackwell. Both Zuccarello and Trenin (upper body) are game time decisions tonight according to Head Coach John Hynes.<\/p>\n
Minnesota will look to keep riding the hot hands of Joel Eriksson Ek (2-2=4) and Kirill Kaprizov (1-3=4), who are both T-2nd among all Stanley Cup Playoff skaters with four points each. Brock Faber, who leads all Stanley Cup Playoff skaters with a plus-6 rating, is another player the Wild will look to lean on. In Game 2 on Monday night, Faber became the second defenseman in franchise history to score multiple goals in single playoff game, joining Jared Spurgeon who has done it on two separate occasions.<\/p>\n
A fast start for either team tonight could prove to be beneficial, as whoever scored first in the first two games went onto win. In the regular season, Minnesota went 33-6-6 when scoring first, including\u00a0 16-2-4 inside\u00a0Grand Casino Arena. On the flipside, Dallas was 34-6-2 when scoring first overall, with a 18-1-2\u00a0record\u00a0on the road.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fans are going to be there, and they are going to get that building going,\u201d said Wild forward Ryan Hartman after Game 2. \u201cHopefully we can get off to an early start and get them into it right away.\u201d<\/p>\n
Game 3\u2019s have been kind to Minnesota, as it has won its previous two–last year against Vegas and 2023 against Dallas. Both times Minnesota went up 2-1 in the series, and both times fell in six games. The Wild will look to use the momentum and adrenaline from its home crowd tonight and take another 2-1 series lead that hopefully leads to a different series outcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back home and back to work. The Minnesota Wild hosts the Dallas Stars for Game 3 of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":558168,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5117],"tags":[196,147,5278,5,4,197],"class_list":{"0":"post-558167","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-dallas-stars","8":"tag-dallas","9":"tag-dallas-stars","10":"tag-dallasstars","11":"tag-hockey","12":"tag-nhl","13":"tag-stars"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116450010001138578","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558167\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/558168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}