Ok we have had a couple of days to digest the loss to Chicago and what we have learned from the first 3/4 of the Wild season?

The loss is that just a loss. I know the media will chirp up the mighty Blackhawks and how they are the team to beat and to a degree they are that. Even Bruce Boudreau acknowledges that to be the best you first have to beat the best and the last two times the teams have met the Hawks came away with the two points.

Chicago still is Kane, Toews, Keith, Seabrook, Hjalmarsson, Crawford, Hossa, and Company and they have the three Cup titles to fall back on. Combine that with the fact that they are now hitting stride and they look much like the Hawks of the Cup years.

It is easy to gush over teams when they are winning much as we have done with the Wild who, oh by the way, have not lost back to back games since early November. The Wild also have had significant success against the Hawks over the last few seasons, and prior to Tuesday had gone 9 straight against Chicago without a regulation loss (8-0-1).

Yes there was that four game Blackhawks playoff sweep in the middle of that streak, which is all the focus of the media and hockey experts. So to be the best you have to beat the best.

Well this year's Wild team is not at all the same team that lost three straight seasons to the Hawks, nor are the Hawks as good as they were in those three seasons.

So what gives? A lot will be talked about leading up to the playoffs and the Wild's inability to make a deep run. That talk will be combined with the playoff record of Bruce Boudreau and his team's untimely exits.

That is all good talk and makes for great debate, but until the games are played it is just that, talk!

The games will have to be played in order to show if past history dictates future results, or past history triggers adjustments to change future results.

For everyone out there saying BB is a great regular season coach that can't win in the playoffs, I give you Joel Quenneville. Much as I wrote in my blogs last Spring when Boudreau was first fired that Wild should target him at all cost, and then again when they landed him as the new bench boss.

Joel Quenneville coached 11 seasons with St. Louis and Colorado prior to being hired in Chicago. During those 11 seasons his teams qualified for the playoffs 9 times and only once did they get past the 2nd round of the playoffs. Now fast forward now in his ninth season behind the Hawks bench he has won 3 Cups and been to the Conference Finals 2 additional times.

So was Quenneville a losing coach? After all, he coached 11 seasons prior to getting the right combination of players and good fortune to win a Cup, actually 12 because he won his first Cup in his second season in Chicago.

Compare that with Bruce Boudreau and we see that Boudreau is in his 10th season behind an NHL bench and his teams have won their division in every season that he has coached and entire season with the same team. His teams have also only gotten to one Conference Final, just like Quenneville, prior to his days in Chicago.

So before you get all over the past results, look at the fact that both coaches and teams make adjustments in how they do things to win.

There is no doubt that Bruce Boudreau is one of the best coaches in the game and the Wild are not the same team that they have been the last four years.

Time will tell and we can speculate all we want, but in the end this will be decided in the Spring, not on paper, but on the ice. Can't wait to see a Wild Hawks 2nd round playoff series.

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