Wild face fresh reality: They need to win now and must do it without key players

DENVER - The score and shot clock weren’t all that was lopsided between the Wild and Utah Hockey Club.

So was the urgency, with Utah vying to catch up to a playoff spot and showing as much in a 6-1 drubbing Thursday against a Wild team propped up by a decent cushion thanks to their impressive first half.

“I don’t want to say we were comfortable,” alternate captain Marcus Foligno said. “But it looked like that.”

Much more was at stake for the Wild only 24 hours later, but they still faltered.

After an alert and assertive start Friday night, they were overwhelmed 5-2 by the Avalanche and lost ground in the Central Division, the jostling between them, Colorado and Dallas behind NHL leader Winnipeg a battle that could go down to the wire.

But the buffer the Wild built won’t last if they don’t defend it against whatever motivation is spurring on the opposition.

“These are the games you have to win,” goaltender Filip Gustavsson said. “Utah’s fighting to get to a wild-card spot, and this [Avalanche] team is right on us now. Same points. Losing two crucial games like we did this road trip is not the way to do it.

“You need to get points somewhere.”

It’ll take more than a three-game losing streak to sabotage the Wild’s standing, but what makes bouncing back trickier is the state of their roster.

They’re without superstar Kirill Kaprizov and two-way force Joel Eriksson Ek, their most vital forwards. Zach Bogosian sat out his first game of the season Friday with a lower-body injury, and fellow defenseman Jonas Brodin left early.

The Wild have persevered with a patchwork lineup before, but now the challenge is to do that late in the season when seeding is being solidified.

“We have no choice,” veteran winger Mats Zuccarello said. “We’re missing some really important guys on our team, but that’s the reality of it. We have to find a way in here.”

In their absence on the team’s winless road trip, though, the Wild strayed from their identity.

They were discombobulated vs. Utah, a far cry from the seamless predictability that propelled their early success — just like their stinginess. The Wild remained vulnerable defensively against the Avalanche.

“We’re going to look at the trouble we had this game and [last] on why they gained so easy offense on us and all that stuff to minimize that because earlier in the year and prior we’ve been great in limiting their chances,” Gustavsson said. “Now it feels like we just open it up and just give them ice and time and stuff like that.

“So we just have to tighten up because right now we’re not scoring five, six goals every game. So we can’t let in more than three.”

To achieve this, the Wild don’t have to drastically change.

Instead, a back-to-basics mentality would help, “just making the plays,” Zuccarello explained, “hitting each other in stride, kind of making each other a little bit better out there.”

Because they’re still a top-10 team in the NHL, most of the Wild’s competition has fewer points than them — including their next opponent Sunday afternoon at Xcel Energy Center, the Bruins, who are behind the playoff pace in the Eastern Conference.

But that doesn’t mean the Wild can’t feel the desperation of a playoff race: They should because they are being chased.

“Our team has risen to the challenge all year long,” coach John Hynes said. “We’ve had some setbacks along the way, and as always, I think you take the lessons out of it. I think we’ve been taught some pretty good lessons.

“We know the details that you need to play with. We gotta make sure on Sunday we have those details along with the effort and competitiveness that’s required to win an NHL game.”

2:30 p.m. Sunday, Xcel Energy Center

TV; radio: TNT/truTV; 100.3-FM

The Wild were shut out 3-0 by Boston on Feb. 4. This is the end of a back-to-back for the Bruins. They’re 5-1-1 in the second games of back-to-backs.