SAN JOSE, Calif. — The nine games left in the regular season will be significant, helping decide where the Wild finish in the West Division.
But the team's fate is already sealed.
The Wild are going to the playoffs.
A 6-3 win over the Sharks on Saturday night at SAP Center did the trick, making the Wild just the third team in the NHL to punch its postseason ticket. Division rivals Vegas and Colorado are the others.
This is the eighth time over the past nine seasons the Wild has advanced, and their latest clincher comes during the team's best run of the year; the Wild have won a season-high seven in a row after sweeping this four-game road trip.
After a pregame ceremony recognized Patrick Marleau for passing Gordie Howe for the most games played in NHL history earlier in the week, the Wild got down to business quickly — scoring three goals on six shots.
On the game's first shot just 19 seconds after puck drop, Ryan Suter swooped into San Jose territory and wired a shot by goalie Martin Jones. Jordan Greenway's team-leading 22nd assist on the play gave him 28 points, which ties his career high.
His line with Joel Eriksson Ek and Marcus Foligno was also behind the second goal, continuing their strong play this trip.
After Kaapo Kahkonen made a clutch stop on a redirect by Marc-Edouard Vlasic, the Wild went with the other way with Eriksson Ek setting up Foligno for a shot he buried behind Jones at 12 minutes.
The goal was Foligno's second in the past three games, and he has four points over his past five. Eriksson Ek's assist extended his career-long point streak to five games. Overall, the line registered four goals and 10 points during the week.
With 2:17 to go in the first, captain Jared Spurgeon added a third goal, jumping into the play to finish off a Ryan Hartman pass.
Jones was replaced by Josef Korenar to start the second, exiting with five saves. Korenar totaled 15 in relief, giving up just one goal in the second — a rebound deflected in by Kevin Fiala at 19:10. The goal was Fiala's third of the week, stretching his point streak to four games. He and Spurgeon both had two points.
At the other end, the Sharks didn't get a puck by Kahkonen until 1:19 of the third when Logan Couture swiped a rebound into a yawning cage after Kahkonen slid wide after an earlier save.
Kirill Kaprizov answered back at 4:28 of the third on the power play to push his goal streak to five games.
But San Jose kept hanging around, scoring on an Evander Kane backhand at 4:47 before Joachim Blichfeld went top shelf at 6:06.
Kahkonen ended up with 27 saves in his second straight win. His 14 victories are the most by a Wild rookie goalie in team history.
Usually, the Wild don't find out whether they're playoff-bound until the final few days of the season.
In 2016, the team clinched after the second-to-last game. The two years before that, the Wild secured a berth with two games to go.
And last year, the team learned it'd be part of the NHL's 24-team postseason tournament after the regular season was suspended by the pandemic.
The team's stint in the playoff bubble was brief, with the Wild getting expelled in four games by Vancouver during a qualifying-round series.
