Minnesota Wild keeps goalies on the move as the team juggles three

The Wild have played only one game and already their goalie carousel is spinning.

Jesper Wallstedt went from being on the roster after a superb training camp to getting assigned to the minors hours before the season opener, a 3-2 win over Columbus on Thursday night at Xcel Energy Center. But by Friday afternoon, Wallstedt was back practicing with the team in St. Paul.

The Wild forecasted there would be some musical chairs while trying to juggle three goaltenders, and they were right.

“You talk to him,” coach John Hynes said of Wallstedt understanding the situation. “Never assume. Just a quick line of communication is good with that.”

Wallstedt was assigned to Iowa so the Wild could call up Daemon Hunt.

With Declan Chisholm sick, they had only six available defensemen and they wanted the insurance in case someone else became ill or got injured in warmups before Thursday’s game. Neither scenario happened, Chisholm returned to practice Friday, and the Wild sent Hunt back to Iowa and added Wallstedt.

If nothing changes with their manpower, the Wild anticipate taking Wallstedt, Filip Gustavsson and Marc-Andre Fleury on their first road trip that starts Sunday in Winnipeg.

Next up, though, is a visit from Seattle on Saturday after Gustavsson got first crack in the crease, denying 31 shots to help the Wild weather a late push from the Blue Jackets after they moved within a goal with less than three minutes remaining in the third period.

Gustavsson was especially clutch when Columbus pulled its goalie for an extra attacker, turning in two key stops on Adam Fantilli and Yegor Chinakhov in the final 30 seconds.

“Someone needs to stay calm there and just try to hold the fort down,” Gustavsson said. “As a goalie, you’re the last line of defense there. If you’re all scrambly, the rest of the team’s going to [be], too. I just tried to play as calm [as possible] and … hopefully the pucks hit me.”

Even though the outcome wasn’t a shutout, the performance was reminiscent of when Gustavsson blanked Florida 2-0 in last season’s home opener with a 41-save effort.

But as Gustavsson pointed out, that debut by the Wild wasn’t a trendsetter.

“Last year, we started off with a pretty good game, too,” he said. “We just didn’t get a Game 2 that was good enough or Game 3 or Game 4. We didn’t find it in the beginning.”

Their showing against the Blue Jackets, a bottom-five team a season ago, was far from perfect: Gustavsson was locked in, and the second line thrived, scoring twice before Matt Boldy set up Mats Zuccarello on the power play. But there wasn’t much rhythm on the first and third lines.

Still, what needs to improve emerged against the backdrop of a victory, and that wasn’t always the case last season.

“We did win the game,” Hynes said. “We did get two points. We did play stretches of the hockey game that were really good. They played stretches that were really good, so there’s zero overreaction to it.

“We’ve just got to make sure we continue to get better.”