Postgame: Wild's latest loss at least allows it to gain a bit of ground on Nashville, Colorado

I'm nothing if not Mr. Positive, so I come with good news.

The Wild still gained ground on 7th-place Nashville and 8th-place Colorado tonight with a 4-3 overtime loss to Dallas. Both of them lost in regulation, and the Wild moved within two points.

The Wild has a game in hand on the Preds, three on the Avs. But the tricky thing about "games in hand" is they're absolutely, utterly, entirely meaningless if you NEVER, EVER WIN!!!

But I digress.

The Wild fell to 1-10 in overtimes and shootouts with tonight's John Klingberg dagger. The Stars star defenseman scored his second OT winner against the Wild this season and the Stars' third overall.

After Jamie Benn fed him in the high slot, Klingberg said, "I had a lot of time to aim where I wanted to shoot, so I was trying to go high and it was nice to see it go in."

He had a lot of time because the Wild gave up an odd-man rush because Thomas Vanek finally chose to change after a 70-second shift. He had a chance to change about 20 seconds before, but instead curled right and went back into the zone.

Finally, Mikey Reilly sent him a bouncing back in the neutral zone. Tired at the end of a long shift, Vanek probably should have chipped it and change. Instead, he shoveled it to the bench saying that he thought Reilly would continue into the offensive zone. He didn't. He changed for Marco Scandella.

So by the time the puck was turned over, that's when Vanek finally changed for Zach Parise and the Wild was dead meat en route to a sixth consecutive overall loss since Jan. 21 (0-4-2), sixth consecutive home loss since Dec. 28 (0-3-3) and 11th loss in the past 12 games (1-9-2).

That's the risk of using Vanek I suppose in OT. I remember in a training camp scrimmage, Vanek scored a 3-on-3 goal and I noted it on Twitter and then commented that I wasn't too sure how much we'd see Vanek in 3-on-3 though.

After all, 3-on-3 is about speed. I asked Yeo though, and he pointed out to me that 3-on-3 is also about skill and scoring.

Fair enough. But this is not the first time Vanek had an OT shift where you had to hold your breath this season. It's just amazing how many of the Wild's eight 3-on-3 losses this season can be pinned on a veteran either overextending his shift or a bad change.

When I asked Yeo about using Vanek in overtime after tonight's game, he didn't want to go there.

Regardless, this was a game the Wild very easily could have won. Trailing 3-2 heading into the third, the Wild had one heck of a push after Mikko Koivu's power-play goal to snap a 17-game drought 1:44 in.

The Wild had the period's first 12 shots and outshot the Stars 17-4 in the period.

"They got us on our heels," Stars coach Lindy Ruff said. "We got caught in a couple of long shifts; one time, we had three different players from three different lines. It's why I used the timeout to try and gather ourselves and get going. I thought the last seven minutes, we got ourselves going in the right direction. But they're a desperate team, we knew they'd be desperate. I thought they started off well, I thought we had a pretty good push in the middle of the game and they had a pretty strong push at the start of the third. That power-play goal gave them some life. Sometimes you have to survive through a team's push and I thought we did."

And that's the thing. The Wild pushed and couldn't cash in more than the once. And that proved costly yet again.

Up 1-0 and 2-1, the Wild blew a pair of one-goal leads, which I supposed is nothing compared to the 2- and 3-goal leads the Wild blew to the Stars at home in separate losses earlier this season.

But what's concerning is even though the Wild has shown positive signs of getting out of this thing the past two games, defensively, it's giving up goals left and right. The Wild has allowed 17 goals in the past four games and at least four goals in a game in five of the past six.

Of course, tonight was behind a very undermanned blue line with Jared Spurgeon and Jonas Brodin hurt. Ryan Suter logged 33 minutes, 15 seconds.

The Wild outchanced the Stars for the most part, outshot them 40-30 and attempted 68 shots with Zach Parise and Ryan Suter combining for 21 attempts.

"We're playing better," Parise said. "We're not getting results, so that's a problem. I think we're playing with a little more enthusiasm, a little more jam, and that's a good sign."

For a second loss in a row, Yeo went looking for the positives after this one. He feels the Wild's taking steps in the right direction.

"It's very easy right now to find negatives. It's extremely easy," he said. "But nothing easy is going to get us out of this. It's a concern, if you look at that game, for sure there were some opportunities to point out some things that were not good enough, but it's another step compared to the last game. Unfortunately …. We're not all about moral victories and we're not all about trying to just point out the positives and deflect against what's real, but truth of the matter is, that's the only way out of this.

"The fight that we had in the third period, that was great. That hasn't been there for us lately. We went after it. We went out, tied the game up and obviously had great opportunities to take the lead, as well. Second period, obviously not good enough, but I think we addressed what was going wrong there and that's what we have to combat right now. You have in a shift in your mind where you go from, 'Let's go win this game,' to, 'Oh boy, I hope we don't lose it.' When that happens, you start watching and you start reacting. I think that was the case in the second period."

The Wild has been outscored 10-2 in the past four second periods.

"I put a quote on the board tonight," Yeo said. "It kind of reflects where we're at right now. Tough times, they don't last, but tough people do. That's what we have to do right now. And this is how we've gotten ourselves out of it before. There have been many times before where it felt like the end of the world, and I can sit here and point to a lot of different times where the season was on the line, regular season, playoffs, whatever, and we responded. That's what we have to do again. We only got one of the two points tonight, but we gained a point on Nashville [and Colorado], and these are little things that we'll keep building. If we can stay strong and continue to get stronger in our game and continue to have a chance and outshoot teams, we will win."

Erik Haula scored a goal and assist. Justin Fontaine scored his first goal since Dec. 5. Vanek had two assists. That line was going early.

Vanek and Fontaine always seem to have chemistry and Yeo told Haula the other say, "If he keeps going like this, I don't want to take him out because he's playing very well. I've been happy with his game – Another positive for us. The speed, obviously, and the second goal, it's coming back and doing the right things on our end and it's countering and that's a little more glimpse of Minnesota Wild hockey."

In Wednesday's Star Tribune, check out my gamer, Alex Tuch notebook, Chip Scoggins' column, Jason Gonzalez' digital inclusions from the TCF Bank Stadium move-in by the NHL and a live blog with videos he did during tonight's game with fans.

Check out the latest Russo-Souhan Show right here. Lots of honesty in here (or opinion) on the Wild.

Lastly, you will see this Wednesday, but former Wild enforcer Zenon Konopka took two big Twitter potshots at Mike Yeo after tonight's loss. It blew up after. All I can tell you is that Konopka and Yeo had a lot of issues behind the scenes and that's why he ended up on waivers two Januarys ago right before it erupted in the second half.

So, there's a lot of history there.

But, I include the tweets because it exploded bigtime on Twitter tonight and because the lovable Hoppy makes an appearance (here's a Konopka feature I once wrote).