Utah comes into the week in a much calmer spot. The Mammoth are 8-4-0 and beat Tampa Bay 5-4 at home when Dmitri Simashev scored at 1:44 of overtime, coming back from 4 goals allowed through 2 periods against a Lightning team on the second night of a back-to-back. That's the same situation the Wild will be in, but with even more travel behind them. Utah plays nothing between that win and this game, so it gets 2 full days off at home while Minnesota is still flying around the Pacific Northwest.
Utah's games have been wild. The Mammoth have scored 5 three times in their last 5 and also given up 4, 5 and 6 in that stretch. It's a fast team that hasn't figured out its own end, and the blue line is part of the reason. John Marino was downgraded from day-to-day to week-to-week with an upper-body injury, and per KSL there's no guarantee he's back before the end of October. Maveric Lamoureux is still on injured reserve, which pushes Simashev and Nick DeSimone up into a pairing that has played real minutes in recent projected lineups. Michael Carcone (upper body) is out up front too, and Utah called up Artem Duda from Tucson to fill the roster spot.
Minnesota's injury list is longer and hurts more. Brock Faber had surgery to repair a skull fracture from a puck to the head in the last preseason game and has no timetable to return. Both Folignos, Marcus and Nick, are on injured reserve too, which strips out a lot of the Wild's bottom-six grit. Kirill Kaprizov and Quinn Hughes still lead the roster, and the matchup comes down to that: whether the Wild's top end can push Utah's thinned blue line back, or whether a tired team that has scored 1 and 3 in its last 2 games gets dragged into the kind of track meet the Mammoth keep playing.