If you turned the TV off when Minnesota was up 3-1 late in the third, you missed one of the most brutal collapses of the entire playoffs. The Wild had the series on a platter, the building was rocking, and then Nathan MacKinnon decided he wasn't going home. A snipe to tie it, overtime, and suddenly the Avs are popping champagne and the State of Hockey is staring at the ceiling wondering what just happened.
The tying goal that flipped the entire series, with Colorado clawing back from down multiple in the final minutes.
MacKinnon has always been one of the scariest players in the league, but something different has been bubbling since he botched that empty-netter at the Olympics. He's been playing with that specific brand of fury reserved for guys who feel like the hockey world clowned them on the biggest stage. Whitney clocked it in real time, wondering aloud about MacKinnon's top speed through the neutral zone, and the Barstool main account put the bow on it the next morning — a true supervillain origin story, and Minnesota was the unlucky first victim.
The supervillain framing of MacKinnon's run, traced back to that Olympics empty-net miss.
For the Wild, this one is going to sting forever. They lost their best center and a top-4 defenseman against the best team in the league, hung in there longer than anyone had a right to expect, and then ran out of gas at the exact wrong moment. Whitney, who plays a Wild fan on Spittin' Chiclets roughly half the time, didn't even bother roasting them — he just laid out exactly what the loss of Eriksson Ek and Brodin did to that lineup.
Whitney's read on why the Wild ran out of gas, with the injuries doing them in.
Minny just ran out of gas. That overtime looked like Wild players were in the 5ot. It was only a matter of a time. The Loss of Eriksson ask and Brodin was just too much. Colorado is too good. Wow just 5 games can’t believe it.
And of course there's the Biz angle. Paul Bissonnette has spent the entire postseason getting absolutely cooked by Minnesota fans for picking against them, riding the Avs bandwagon, and generally being Biz. Whitney summed up the whole vibe perfectly — Wild fans want the guy dead, but Biz is just over there counting his blessings that his weekend just opened back up.
Whitney joking that the Biz hate from Minnesota is just buying him a free weekend.
Minnesota fans want biz dead. Little do they know the guy is just happy to not have to work this weekend 😂
On to the Conference Final. Colorado looks like the team nobody's going to want to see, MacKinnon looks like a man on a mission, and somewhere in Minnesota a generation of hockey fans is dusting off the same therapy folder they've been keeping since the North Stars left. Brutal sport, brutal night, great hockey.