The Minnesota Wild and Dallas Stars meet Thursday in St. Paul for Game 6 of their Western Conference first-round series, with Minnesota carrying a 3-2 lead and one win from the next round. The winner moves on to face the Colorado Avalanche.
For the Wild, wild game tonight means a chance to finally end an 11-year wait for a playoff round victory. Minnesota has not advanced since the 2015 first round against the St. Louis Blues, and its most recent elimination memory still stings: a 6-2 loss in Game 7 of the 2021 Stanley Cup First Round against the Vegas Golden Knights in Las Vegas.
The series shifted sharply Tuesday, when Minnesota beat Dallas 4-2 on the road to seize control. Now the scene changes to Grand Casino Arena, where more than 19,200 fans are expected and where the Wild will try to close out a rival that has made a habit of surviving, or nearly surviving, when the season is on the line.
The numbers give Minnesota reason for confidence. Teams that lead a best-of-7 series 3-2 and return home for Game 6 have won that game 78.3 percent of the time, a sample of 145-40 in postseason history. That does not make Thursday automatic, but it does show how often the team with the lead finishes the job in front of its own crowd.
Dallas arrives with a different kind of pressure. The Stars are facing elimination for the ninth time in 10 playoff rounds since 2023, a run that has repeatedly put them in high-stakes spots and, at times, knocked them out. They went 5-3 in their previous eight elimination games since 2023, but the recent losses that matter most are the ones in the conference final: Game 6 against the Vegas Golden Knights in 2023 and Game 6 against the Edmonton Oilers in 2024.
That history is part of why Thursday feels so loaded, even in a short series. John Hynes said the circumstances around the game do no good if that is where the Wild's focus lands. His message was straightforward: Minnesota has to stay on its game plan, execute and avoid spending energy on what it cannot control. He added that there were a couple of times early in the series when the Wild let some of the emotion get into their play.
Brock Faber said much the same from the player side, saying the Wild have to control their emotions and stay poised when the building gets loud. He said the crowd can make players want to run all over the ice, and that the key is to feed off the noise without losing structure. Faber called it a fun night, which is about as close as hockey players get to admitting the moment is bigger than the shift.
Dallas, for its part, is leaning on familiarity with pressure. Glen Gulutzan said the advantage in Dallas is that the group has been battle tested and has lived through tough situations before, starting with captain Jamie Benn and spreading through the roster. He said that was clear in a morning video session and described the team as confident but not cocky, operating at a high level without going too high. For the Stars, the task is simple to say and hard to do: force a Game 7 and put Minnesota back in the same uncomfortable place it has avoided for nearly a decade. For the Wild, Thursday is a chance to turn a long wait into a new path, in front of a crowd that has spent 11 years waiting for exactly this moment.