Hawks can't win the close ones, fall 3-2 to Wild

ST. PAUL, Minn. - Maybe someday soon the Blackhawks will figure out a way to win these close games.

That's their plan, anyway.

The Hawks' 3-2 loss to the Minnesota Wild on Monday night was their sixth in nine games and the fourth by 1 goal.

A soft goal by Cristobal Huet, a failed 5-on-3 and a lack of traffic in front of the Minnesota goal all contributed to a tough night at the Xcel Energy Center.

The Hawks outshot the Wild 36-18 but weren't crisp around goalie Niklas Backstrom.

"I don't think we really tested him too much," Patrick Sharp said. "We got some pucks to the net, but we just didn't have the traffic and bodies in front. He's a world-class goaltender and he's going to make those saves from the outside.

"We tried to make too many cute plays and centered pucks into their defensive zone coverage."

This was another winnable game for the Hawks, just as those against St. Louis and Detroit in which they blew third-period leads. The Hawks are 2-1-2 under coach Joel Quenneville and 3-3-3 for the season.

"We weren't willing to pay the price tonight," captain Jonathan Toews said. "We weren't doing the little things that a high-energy, efficient team does. They made us force plays and just waited for us to make mistakes, and that's what happened tonight."

The Hawks trailed 2-1 early in the second period when they failed on a 5-on-3 power play that lasted 67 seconds, never even getting a good setup to fire away at Backstrom.

"That's my fault," Toews said. "I'm supposed to be in front of the net screening the goalie and I wasn't in the right position.

"Our power play kind of reflected our energy. We were just flat."

It wasn't much later that the Wild got a power-play goal from Brent Burns to go ahead 3-1, making the missed 5-on-3 loom even larger.

"I always feel if you don't score on a 5-on-3 you don't deserve to win, and that's generally the result," Quenneville said. "We can always look back and that might have been the difference."

Wild coach Jacques Lemaire thought the killed 5-on-3 was critical.

"It was huge, especially against that team," said Lemaire, whose Wild is 6-0-1. "You look at the five guys that were out there. It was scary."

Huet made only his fourth start of the season and did little to convince Quenneville to play him more over Nikolai Khabibulin.

On Antti Miettinen's goal at 4:31 of the second period that snapped a 1-1 tie, Huet let the stoppable-looking shot from in the slot get through his pads.

It was the first time since the second game of the season in Washington that the Hawks failed to pick up a point.

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