Twenty-three games now and Wild center James Sheppard has yet to score a goal during a season he was supposed to break out under a new offensive-minded coach.
This is why left wing Colton Gillies, who played 45 games last season as a 19-year-old, is in the minors. The Wild doesn't want Gillies to follow in Sheppard's footsteps.
"I told him after camp, 'Don't sit by the phone whenever there's an injury and wait for a call-up,'" Wild GM Chuck Fletcher told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "We don't want to just bring him up for a game here or two games there and send him down. We think mentally that would be even harder on him.
"The goal has been for him to go down there, get a lot of ice time, play special teams and play in a lot more situations than he could here at this stage of his career. When he comes back, we want him to have a real good chance to be here for the rest of his career."
Sheppard, the ninth overall pick in 2006, arrived in the NHL in 2007 at age 19. The Wild felt he'd develop better under Jacques Lemaire than in Cape Breton, and because he wasn't 20, he couldn't be sent to Houston.
But he could have been sent there last season, and the Wild opted against it. Now he requires waivers to be sent down.
This means that unlike Gillies, who's playing 20 minutes a night in every situation, Sheppard hasn't gotten big responsibilities since 2006-07 in juniors.
When Gillies was delivered the news that he didn't make the Wild out of training camp, the 20-year-old had to fight back tears.
"I was devastated," said Gillies, the 16th overall pick in 2007. "It kind of felt like everything I did in the summer, and I worked so hard and I had all these goals, was for nothing.
"But once I actually got down here to Houston, I started to embrace it. I'm really enjoying myself and know it's for the best."
WILD 3, AVALANCHE 2 (SO): In his second game with the Wild, Guillaume Latendresse forced overtime with the tying goal and Mikko Koivu and recently acquired Andrew Ebbett scored in the shootout as the Wild completed a home-and-home sweep of their rivals. Josh Harding made 20 saves and then two more in the shootout for his first win of the season. It was a game in which the Wild dominated but had to rally back from a 2-0 deficit. "Two huge wins vs. our rivals in two days," said Latendresse. "We knew we were playing better than them. We knew we should have had this game easy in regulation. But hockey's like that. We dominate and we're down 2-0. We got the big two points, though."
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