By Chad Graff
St. Paul Pioneer Press
ST. PAUL - The players skated in the same drills led, mostly, by the same coaches. The same front-office personnel watched from their usual perch, a row of folding chairs above section 117 at the Xcel Energy Center.
The players returned from the first official practice of training camp to the same locker stalls that stored their equipment last season.
And so, after a summer defined more by moves they didn’t make than ones they did, the Wild opened training camp Friday as a team remarkably similar to the one that went on a memorable run last season before falling, again, to the Chicago Blackhawks in the second round of the NHL playoffs.
“That’s a good thing,” captain Mikko Koivu said of the continuity.
Koivu, the franchise’s only full-time captain, has been on the team longer than any other player. He will begin his 11th season with the franchise when the Wild begin playing for real Oct. 8 against the Colorado Avalanche.
His tenure outdates the coaching staff and front office.
And yet not even Koivu, drafted by the Wild in 2001, can remember an offseason in which so little changed.
“It’s the first time for me that it’s so similar to last year,” Koivu said. “There have been a lot of changes since I’ve been here, but to me it’s a very good thing to start the season with familiar guys and mostly guys you’ve played with the last couple seasons. I think it’s a very good thing.”
Rather than beginning anew Friday, the first day of training camp seemed more like a midseason practice. The only difference was with 58 players in camp, workouts were split into three sessions to accommodate the expanded roster.
The Wild won’t have many of the annual roster battles that highlight training camps across the NHL.
Some spots are up for grabs - forwards Tyler Graovac, Jordan Schroeder and Kurtis Gabriel and defenseman Mike Reilly are pushing for a spot on the team - but all of the Wild’s key players are back.
And because the Wild ended last season with a 28-9-3 record, they’re confident they can pick up where they left off.
“At the end of last year, I think we were able to understand how good of a team we are and how good of a team we can be,” goalie Devan Dubnyk said. “There’s no reason to not play that way the entire season. We would like to be in a position where we go 28-9 at the end because we want to, not because we have to. We’ll be a little better at the start, hopefully.”
That’s where most Wild players feel the team has an advantage. Because of the continuity, several said, they feel they’re opening camp ahead of other teams.
But with a team where so much is the same as last season, there are warning signs, too.
“You want to make sure things aren’t stale, that’s for sure,” coach Mike Yeo said. “You want to make sure that just because we know the system, we don’t come in and just do it because we have to do it. We have to do it with a purpose.”
After the Wild acquired Dubnyk last season in mid-January, they were one of the best teams in the league. With Dubnyk re-signed to a six-year contract, there’s plenty of optimism in the Wild locker room.
They were the league’s best penalty kill team last season and finished sixth in goals allowed despite the goaltending woes that plagued them the first half of the season.
All-star defenseman Ryan Suter agrees with Yeo that the team needs to remain vigilant against complacency.
“We have to know that we lost our last game,” Suter said. “We got swept in the playoffs (against the Blackhawks). I think that right there will give us the urgency we need at the start of the year. It’s going to be hard; our division is good, the whole league is good. So we have to come out of the gate well, and hopefully it does give us an advantage. But it’s only an advantage if you take advantage of it.”
