The Minnesota Wild carried a four-game winning streak into Thursday night’s meeting with the Dallas Stars, and the standings made the stakes plain: Minnesota was two points back with four games left for each team. A regulation win would keep the Wild in position to chase home ice in the opening round. An overtime result, or a loss, would make that far harder to reach.
Dallas had already secured the first tiebreaker with 35 regulation wins to Minnesota’s 30, so the Wild needed more than a good night in one game. They needed a result that changed the picture. That was part of what made Thursday matter. It was not just another meeting between teams separated by a couple of points. It was a direct test of whether Minnesota could turn its late surge into a playoff advantage before the schedule ran out.
Marcus Foligno said the Wild were treating the night like a preview of what could come later, stressing that anything can happen in the playoffs and that the goal was to put together a strong road game and give Dallas something to think about. He called for a competitive game and pointed back to the last time Minnesota played in Dallas. The Wild were also tied for the second-most road wins in the NHL with 23, a sign that they have traveled better than they have protected home ice at times this season.
The teams entered the night close in the numbers that matter most. Minnesota was 2-1 against Dallas this season, and the Wild had shown they could score against a club that had already won the division race’s first tiebreaker. Kirill Kaprizov and Matt Boldy were 40-goal scorers for Minnesota, while Jason Robertson had topped the 40-goal mark and Wyatt Johnston had scored 43 for Dallas. The Stars, though, were banged up compared with the mostly healthy Wild, even as Jake Oettinger had been superb in many meetings with Minnesota and Roope Hintz was injured.
That combination gave the matchup a familiar feel. The Wild had lost to Dallas twice in the first round, most recently in 2023, when they dropped a six-game series after discipline and penalty-kill problems helped sink them. They entered Thursday with a better record on the road, better health and better momentum than they had in that series, but the memory of 2023 still hung over this matchup. Minnesota has spent the season trying to show it can handle pressure games, not just survive them.
The tension is that the Wild still have to prove it over the final stretch. They had recently been riding a win-one, lose-one pattern and dropping too many home games against non-playoff opponents before the current streak, and the next step after Dallas was just as unforgiving: at Nashville, at St. Louis and then home against Anaheim. The game in Dallas was important because it could either turn this late run into real playoff leverage or leave Minnesota chasing the same road it has taken before, with the same opponent waiting at the end of it.
