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July 9, 2012

Frederick: Future looks different for the Wild now

By Shane Frederick The Free Press

— When the Minnesota Wild opened its inaugural season in the fall of 2000, the team retired the number 1 as a tribute to the team's fans, many of whom patiently waited seven years for a new National Hockey League franchise after the North Stars departed for Dallas.

Cheap gimmick? Perhaps. But the team was committed to hyping up its fans as the greatest in the world.

The Wild hammered on that theme, honoring hockey-loving folks and the culture of the sport in Minnesota with the motto "The State of Hockey." A cute but cheesy song with the same name was played before every home game.

The team's arena, the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, was designed to be as good as good as any hockey building in North America, with the cheap seats still allowing an excellent view of the action. The Wild made sure to decorate the arena's concourses with jerseys of every high school and college team in the state, too.

The fans ate up all of it.

Then in 2003 -- just three seasons into its existence -- the Wild made an improbable postseason run, making it all the way to the Western Conference Finals of the Stanley Cup playoffs. Along the way, Minnesota ended the career of Hall of Fame goalie Patrick Roy with a thrilling Game 7 overtime win against the Colorado Avalanche and then sparked a bitter rivalry with the Vancouver Canucks before falling to the Anaheim Ducks.

Since that fun run, though, the Wild has made the playoffs just twice in eight years and was upset in the first round both times. This past season, a brilliant first half was all but forgotten by a dreadful second-half collapse.

Minnesota has not made the playoffs since 2008, and has had three coaches in the four years since then.

The Wild started to learn that the goodwill from making the fans the focus-- especially ones as passionate and as intelligent as the state claims to have -- can last for only so long.

Early in the 2010-11 season, an Xcel Energy Center sellout streak ended at 409 games. It was an impressive run of more than 10 seasons, although the rink was littered with rows and rows of empty seats long before the streak officially stopped.

But last week's signing of this summer's top two free agents, Zach Parise and Ryan Suter, to a pair of 13-year, $98-million contracts has ended the ennui.

Although the team has yet to win a game with those two players -- both of whom were officially introduced during a Monday-afternoon event in St. Paul -- it's, as owner Craig Leipold said, "a game-changer."

Since Parise and Suter signed on the Fourth of July, more than 2,000 season tickets have been sold for next season, the team reported.

Getting a pair of star players certainly raised the bar for winning games and going deep into the playoffs. But trying to win is also the best thing the Wild, a team about to embark on its 12th season, could have done for its fans.

And that's no cheap gimmick.



Shane Frederick is a Free Press staff writer. Read his blog at mankatofreepresshockey.blogspot.com, and follow him on Twitter @puckato.

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