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Ryan Hartman owns penalties as Wild slip from playoff spot: ‘I let my team down’

TAMPA, Fla. — Ryan Hartman sat at his dressing room stall, his head down.

You could tell he was frustrated. He was taking this one hard.

The veteran Wild forward had been on the wrong end of an unlucky bounce — Steven Stamkos’ desperation shot bouncing off Hartman’s shoulder and into the net for the winning goal in Tuesday’s 4-2 loss at Amalie Arena.

It was a gut punch, with Minnesota’s third straight defeat coming on a night it felt like it pushed the perennial Cup-contending Lightning to the limit.

The Stamkos goal wasn’t Hartman’s fault. What was more troublesome — and drew the ire of coach Dean Evason — is where Hartman ended up 40 seconds later: in the penalty box. The hooking penalty was his second of the game, continuing a troubling trend of undisciplined and untimely penalties that could end up leading him to get scratched.

“I felt like I let my team down,” Hartman said. “I’m responsible for some of the things that have gone on. Obviously not a good feeling.”

Evason, who came close to benching Hartman in December, defended him after one of his penalties proved costly in Saturday’s loss in Florida. On Tuesday, he was not as forgiving. If Hartman was falling on the sword, the head coach wasn’t saving him.

“He should be hard on himself,” Evason said. “It’s stupid. Absolutely stupid.”

Evason could try to send a message — as he did by scratching Matt Dumba in back-to-back games — by benching Hartman on Thursday against the Flyers. This recent stretch of losses is certainly not all on Hartman. But the urgency around the team is high as the Wild have fallen out of a playoff spot, now one point behind the defending Cup champion Avalanche, who have won six straight. Edmonton and Calgary, who hold the two wild-card spots, keep winning, too.

“We better have absolute desperation in the next hockey game,” Evason said. “We were close (Tuesday) with our game. But we need to see our absolute best game in a couple nights.”

Evason told his team after Tuesday’s loss that if they play like that, more often than not, they’ll give themselves a chance. The staff sent a message with a hard practice Monday, a reminder that this “guest trip” — with fathers, brothers and cousins ​​joining them in Florida — wasn’t a “holiday.”

The Wild responded very well Tuesday in a very physical, intense and entertaining game. There were plenty of scrums, big hits and even some haymakers thrown by Jake Middleton and Nick Paul in a first-period fight.

“It was big-boy hockey,” Lightning coach Jon Cooper said. “It was fun.”

There were also big-time saves by both goaltenders, Marc-Andre Fleury and Andrei Vasilevskiy. The highlight-reel save of the night came by Fleury in the second period on a short-handed breakaway by Brandon Hagel. Fleury, one of the more aggressive goalies, charged out of his crease for a diving pokecheck on Hagel to thwart the threat.

“I just thought, might as well surprise him and not let him settle the puck and get a breakaway,” Fleury said.

Fleury played well enough to win, but the Wild didn’t give him enough offensive support. The problem continues to be simple.

Minnesota was one of the top five-on-five teams last season. This year, it’s not, ranked No. 27 in five-on-five goals.

If the Wild don’t fix that, they’re in deep trouble.

They might be second in the league in short-handed goals (Joel Eriksson Ek got another one Tuesday). And the power play has been good (Kirill Kaprizov added a tally to give them another one-goal lead midway through the game). But they’ve got one five-on-five goal in the last three games, all losses.

The top line has been pretty much invisible as of late. The GREEF line had some strong shifts, especially early on, but hasn’t produced. Matt Boldy has two goals (both power play) in his last 14.

“We’re passing the puck around in the zone a lot,” Hartman said. “We need more bodies at the net. I know I need to generate more.”

Hartman had 34 goals last season, a career high. But he’s got just five in 24 games this season, having missed most of the first few months due to a shoulder injury. He centered the team’s dazzling top line last year, between Kaprizov and Mats Zuccarello, but lost his spot early this season and never got it back. General manager Bill Guerin hoped Hartman’s return from injury would hit a pause button on their need to acquire top-six help. It hasn’t turned out that way.

But the problem for the Wild is that it’s not just Hartman who has regressed offensively. Marcus Foligno has just four goals in 37 games after scoring a career-high 23 a year ago. Jordan Greenway has two goals in 29 games. You had to think after a half-dozen players had career years in the 2021-22 season that this was bound to happen in some fashion.

It just can’t be the Kaprizov show, as even he isn’t infallible. His three shots on goal Tuesday matched his total from the previous three games combined.

“Well, we’ve been on the road for a bit, right, so that’s a little different,” Evason said. “Every team is concentrating on the best player, and Kaprizov is the best player on the Minnesota Wild. He’s getting special attention.”

Evason said he doesn’t usually like to switch up the lines, preferring to let the players work themselves out of it. “They’re in the arena, they’re the ones out there battling,” Evason said. “If we sense some chemistry issues and you’re not having success, you flip it around a little bit. But, for the most part, we want to stay patient.”

Patience was running thin with Dumba, which is why they scratched him Thursday and Saturday. But they went from having a point in seven of eight games to losing three straight. Dumba looked good at times in his return Tuesday, but still ended up a minus-2 in 22 minutes, 23 seconds of ice time. Corey Perry got behind him for his second goal, a deflection on the power play late in the second. “There was a breakdown there,” Dumba said. “I’ve got to try to block that.”

Has Evason finally seen enough to sit Hartman, whom he talked to before about the penalties? I asked Evason what goes into the decision to scratch a veteran player, as with Dumba.

“There’s a lot that goes into it,” Evason said. “It’s not a spur-of-the-moment decision. We didn’t make that decision on a turnover or on a play that happened. We make those decisions on compounded things that continue to happen. Our process as a staff is that we speak to a player, way prior, we show clips, we talk about it. We ask for a player to play a certain way, and if they continually don’t, or we see the same thing, then our last resort is to sit a player, obviously.”

Dumba said he felt there were times in the third period when the Wild were “really pouring it on them.” Hartman thought they “dominated” most of the game. The difference in the game was Stamkos’ goal, which went in after a Mikhail Sergachev centering pass ping-ponged off Matt Boldy’s stick and Jared Spurgeon’s skate to Stamkos’ stick.

“I thought we responded extremely well,” Evason said. “We all thought it was a great hockey game. Did we make some mistakes? Sure. But did we compete off our asses? Yes. We said to the guys after — I hate saying it, ‘The result wasn’t there, but if we play like that.’ But truly if we play like that every night, we’ll give ourselves a better chance to win.”

There are a lot of good things about the Wild — when they play to their identity. They can play a heavy game, they can play strong defensively. It stood out to Hall of Famer Scotty Bowman, who was at Tuesday’s game.

“They’re going to be tough to beat because they play a different style than most teams,” Bowman said The Athletic. “When you’re playing in the playoffs, you play the same team seven times, you got to have some sandpaper. They’ve got a lot of it. They’re spicy.”

But the Wild have to make the playoffs, first. And they need players like Hartman to help them dig themselves out of this rut. He can’t help them from the box, where he is among the league leaders in penalty minutes per game (1:47).

“We have to look at ourselves in the mirror,” Hartman said. “Myself included.”

(Photo: Kim Klement / USA Today)

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