The Minnesota Wild and the Vancouver Canucks have a pretty quick turnaround before they play game four of the Western qualifying round on Friday night. The ‘Nucks now lead the best-of-five series and a win tonight will advance them to the round of 16.

Vancouver hasn’t been in the playoffs since 2015. Minnesota missed last year’s postseason and in the previous three seasons they were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs.

Canucks vs. Wild NHL Betting Odds

Even though they were shut out yesterday afternoon, the Minnesota side has been given the slightly better odds to tie things up tonight. If they want to even the series they’re going to have to try much harder to stay out of the penalty box. Yesterday’s match up saw a total of 22 penalties being called, and none of the Wild’s chances with the man-advantage resulted in a goal. The Canuck scored twice on the power play.

Kevin Fiala has nine goals and six assists over in the last 10 games for the Wild.  J.T. Miller has four goals and seven assists in his last 10 games for the Canucks.

Vancouver Canucks

The Canucks knew a win on Thursday afternoon would give them a solid grip on the series against Minnesota, and they played with the energy and determination needed to accomplish that goal.

With Micheal Ferland and Tyler Toffoli still deemed unfit to play, Travis Green didn’t change things up too much with his lineup from game 3, other than replacing the injured Ferland for Zack MacEwen, who was making NHL Playoffs debut.

The first period of game 3 was scoreless, until finally Brock Boeser opened the scoring at 6:51 in the second period. Elias Pettersson also got an easy goal on the power play with an assist from Quinn Hughes. The young Hughes now leads his club with three assists, which is team record for points earned in a playoff game by a rookie D-man.

Jacob Markstrom earned his first NHL postseason shutout in just his third playoff game. After the game he said this about the achievement, giving huge props to his teammates: “The guys are sacrificing their body with blocking shots.They did a great job cleaning out rebounds and pucks that squirt out from me, it was a huge team win.”

Minnesota Wild

Minnesota could not stay out of the penalty box in Thursday’s game, which saw them shut out of scoring and another loss away from playoff elimination. Wild forward Marcus Foligno talked to reporters after the game about how damaging it was to his club to take eleven penalties. “It’s tough. You’re trying to get flow in the game, and it just seemed like when you did get something going it was a power play or a penalty kill,” said Foligno. “We’re such a good five on five team and when we can roll five lines we’re really good. We definitely just have to calm it down a little bit with the penalties.”

Alex Stalock made 26 saves in his third start of the series.

Another area in which Minnesota needs to improve is on their lackluster power play. They’re 0-13 in the last two games against the Canucks.

Minnesota’s most recently prolific scorer Kevin Fiala, who had four shots on net in the game, acknowledged after the game that the Canucks had their number in game 3 saying, “sometimes we’re going to score, sometimes not. Sometimes there’s just nothing wrong. But they’re blocking a lot of shots, too much. We’ve got to get those through and get us an opportunity to score goals.”

NHL Prediction: Who Will Win Canucks vs. Wild?

CANUCKS

Away

3

WILD

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