NHL Picks: Wild will end skid against Canucks in Torchetti's debut – CBSSports.com
?Welcome to the NHL Daily Picks where hockey writers Adam Gretz and Chris Peters make their selections for all of the day’s games.
Minnesota Wild vs. Vancouver Canucks, 10 p.m. ET
To say the Minnesota Wild are going through a rough stretch at the moment would be a pretty massive understatement. With only one win in their past 14 games, they are in the middle of what might be the worst stretch of games any team in the NHL has had this season. Their current eight-game losing streak that they take into Monday’s game against the Vancouver Canucks is part of that stretch.
The latest loss. Saturday’s 4-2 defeat at the hands of the Boston Bruins ended up resulting in a coaching change behind the bench with John Torchetti, who had been coaching the Wild’s AHL team in Iowa, replacing Mike Yeo after four-and-a-half seasons.
Pretty much everybody in Minnesota is under the assumption this team is underachieving and should be better than its current spot in the standings, currently sitting five points out of a playoff spot in the Western Conference. That belief might be true, but only to a certain extent.
The expectation that this team should be so much better mostly comes from the fact that it has a really expensive roster and it has a lot of big name players that have had a lot of success in the NHL. But a lot of those guys have already played their best hockey and are only going to continue to decline. Even if it’s true that they have underachieved or have been a little unlucky over the past few weeks (and a team-wide five percent shooting percentage would point to at least a little bit of bad luck) it’s probably not going to get that much better anytime soon.
The difficult job Torchetti has in front of him now is finding a way to take an aging, expensive roster and get it back into playoff contention.
The good news for Torchetti in his first game is he’s getting a Canucks team that simply isn’t very good and has its own set of issues, coming off of a huge loss to a Maple Leafs team that was putting an AHL roster on the ice. The Wild and Canucks enter Monday’s game tied in the standings with identical records, while the Canucks have a much worse goal differential on the season. The playoff chances for both teams are pretty much hanging by a thread at this point.
Even though the Wild have lost eight games in a row, the combination of playing another struggling team and the immediate boost that teams tend to get after a coaching change should be enough to help the Wild end their streak. Pick: Minnesota Wild 4, Vancouver Canucks 2
The rest of Monday’s picks
Detroit Red Wings 4, New York Islanders 2
Anaheim Ducks 3, Calgary Flames 1
Pittsburgh Penguins 3, Florida Panthers 2
Dallas Stars 4, Nashville Predators 3
Chicago Blackhawks 5, Toronto Maple Leafs 1
Montreal Canadiens 5, Arizona Coyotes 2
Devan Dubnyk and the Minnesota Wild need a win right now. (USATSI)
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