The Minnesota Wild’s sellout playoff crowds at the Xcel Energy Center have been as roaring and supportive as there have been in the 17-year history of the building.
Still, the Wild lost their first two games of Round 1 before moving to St. Louis for Game 3 on Sunday afternoon. 
Veteran winger Jason Pominville wishes the team could have rewarded its fans with victories.
“It’s pretty entertaining — it’s a loud crowd and they get into it, and when we get that energy, it’s nice,” Pominville said after Friday’s 2-1 loss to the Blues, the Wild’s second 2-1 defeat last week.
“Too bad we weren’t able to give a little more. We hear (the crowd) and definitely feed off of it. It’s pretty fun to have those guys behind us and have their support, for sure.”
First-year Wild coach Bruce Boudreau, to help inspire his players, had quotes from a handful of sports champions painted atop walls of the team’s dressing room.
Quoted are Muhammad Ali, Vince Lombardi, John Wooden, Jerry West, Roy Williams and Jack Nicklaus.
Nicklaus won a record 18 major golf championships. His quote, as chosen by Boudreau, who loves golf: “I know it sounds selfish wanting to do something no one else has done. But that’s why you are here … to separate yourself from everyone else.”
Mike Yeo, the Blues coach, when he coached the Wild had a quote from hockey icon Herb Brooks painted above the runway to the ice: “This is Our Time.” That phrase remains intact at the Xcel Energy Center.
Friday’s game against St. Louis was Minnesota’s 31th straight playoff sellout. Each home playoff in team history has been a sellout. The Wild have sold out 147 straight regular-season games at 17,954 each. Wednesday’s attendance was 19,168; Friday’s was 19,404, the largest of the season.
Wild players salaries end with the regular season. Playoff teams are playing for postseason shares from a leaguewide pool depending on how far they advance. Winning the Stanley Cup would be worth about $200,000 per player.
Normally clean-cut Wild owner Craig Leipold is growing a playoff beard. Leipold is on the edge of his suite seat for virtually every play of his team during playoffs and fist-bumps colleagues on his team’s goals, although there have been just two after two games.
One entrepreneurial Wild ticket owner sold four upper-level tickets (face value $99 apiece) for Wednesday’s opener for $250 apiece. A St. Paul resident in Chicago, near the end of this regular season, sold Blackhawks-Penguins tickets (face value $250 each) on the street for $500 apiece, but it wasn’t easy finding a buyer.
Face value for some lower-level Stanley Cup Finals tickets in St. Paul, should the Wild get that far, are slightly more than $500 apiece. Those same opening-round tickets were slightly more than $200. Third-round tickets are slightly more than $300.
The average ticket price for Wild first-round playoff games via the secondary market is $305, according to TickPick. Highest in the NHL is the Maple Leafs at $606; lowest is the St. Louis Blues at $146.
The Minnesota Twins, by the way, have the 12th-lowest average ticket price in the major leagues at $54.89, according to TickPick. The World Series champion Cubs are No. 1 at $150.63. Cheapest average ticket is the White Sox at $30.26.
The Wild front office expects Parise, 32, and Ryan Suter, 32, to play until at least the end of their $98 million, 13-year contracts that expire in 2025.
Longtime Wild spectators hadn’t heard the Xcel Energy Center louder than when Parise scored the tying goal with 22 seconds remaining in regulation of Wednesday’s late-night game against St. Louis.
Former North Star and KFAN hockey analyst Pat Micheletti, 53, who ranks second on the Gophers’ all-time scoring list, is doing well as the two-year anniversary of receiving a kidney transplant from brother Jerry approaches.
Nobody performs a more stirring national anthem than does James Bohn before Wild games.
It was a candid chat with hall of fame Louisville men’s basketball coach Rick Pitino that has led 7-foot junior Matz Stockman to transfer to Minnesota.
“We talked and he said, ‘Coach, do you see me playing a lot?’ ” Pitino told the Pioneer Press last week. “I said Matz, I can’t tell — we have some great recruits coming in. And then he said he’d like to go someplace ‘where I’m guaranteed to be a factor whether we win or lose a game.’
“And I said, ‘Go to my son (Minnesota coach Richard Pitino) — he’s going to need some (big) players.’ ”
Stockman is from Oslo, Norway. At Louisville, Rick Pitino said “he had the misfortune of playing behind two centers, Mangok Mathiang and Amas Mahmoud. It wasn’t a matter of Matz not being good enough — it was playing behind two outstanding players.”
The scouting report on Stockman from Rick Pitino: “He’s a legitimate seven feet with a big-time 7-4 wingspan and he’s 250 pounds. With a 7-4 wingspan and being seven feet, if he gets near the basket, he’s going to dunk it like a rubber ball.”
Jim Dutcher coached the Gophers men’s basketball team for 11 years, including the 1981-82 Big Ten championship season. After 18 years as an assistant at San Diego State, Dutcher’s son Brian last week was named head coach of the Aztecs.
Jim’s advice for his son?
“Just be yourself — you can’t be somebody you’re not,” said Dutcher, who resides in Edina and turns 84 on Tuesday. “Brian is a hard worker, and he gets along with everybody. He’s not a self-promoter. I think he’ll do a good job.”
Jim Dutcher made $125,000 his final year at Minnesota. Brian, 57, a Bloomington Jefferson and University of Minnesota grad, is expected to make nearly four times that.
“Brian’s never been money driven,” Jim Dutcher said. “That’ll get him off the payroll here.”
Jim laughed.
“This is an opportunity to have your own program,” he said.
Lou Nanne, the former North Stars general manager, consulted on the two-year, rookie maximum contract that grandson and former Gopher Vinni Lettieri recently signed with the New York Rangers. The deal is worth $925,000 per season if Lettieri plays in the NHL, $70,000 in the minor leagues, with annual signing bonuses of $92,500.
Lettieri, 22, a center who scored 19 goals with 18 assists in 38 games for the Gophers this season, went scoreless in his first three games with the Rangers’ Hartford team.
Former Gophers basketball guard Osborne Lockhart, who played 20 years for the Harlem Globetrotters, is a high school teacher in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., reports his former Gophers roommate, Mychal Thompson.
One of Thompson’s three sons, Trayce, has been traded by the White Sox to his hometown Dodgers. Another son, Mychel, plays for the Santa Cruz Warriors in the NBA’s D-League.
Klay Thompson is an NBA all-star for the Golden State Warriors.
“My mother (Marriette) is the best athlete in the family,” said Mychal, the former NBA No. 1 overall draft pick. “I always think of the mother’s genes as those that matter the most. My mother was a tennis champion. My father (DeWitt) didn’t know which end of the basketball to hold.”
Mychal’s wife, Julie, was a track, gymnastics and volleyball star growing up and competed in volleyball for the University of San Francisco.
By the way, Thompson said “three of the best years of my life were playing for Jim Dutcher” with the Gophers.
Juan “Senor Smoke” Berenguer, 62, is selling cars at Jeff Belzer’s Lakeville dealership.
Berenguer’s son Chris, 30, played in the New Jersey Devils system, but concussions ended his hockey career.
It looks like George Carroll, the esteemed country club manager who retired from Interlachen in Edina, will return to his former club of 18 years at Town & Country on a consulting basis.
St. John’s-Collegeville, which will play rival St. Thomas in football at Target Field on Sept. 23, last season led the nation in NCAA Division III football attendance with an average of 7,787 per game. St. Thomas was not among the top 30, averaging 3,130. Bethel was No. 11 with 4,201.
The Target Field game is expected to approach attendance of 25,000.
The Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference led NCAA Division III leagues in football attendance last season with an average of 3,193.
The Gophers averaged 43,814 for their seven home football games. Michigan was No. 1 nationally, averaging 110,468. Wisconsin ranked No. 16 with 79,357, Iowa No. 20 with 69,656.
Guy to watch: North Oaks’ Frankie Capan, 17, who last year missed the cut in the PGA Tour’s Puerto Rico Open by one shot after shooting 74-71, is one of only five golfers chosen for Team USA to compete in the Junior World Cup in June in Nagoya, Japan. Capan has committed to the University of Alabama.
That was St. Paul’s John “Hondo the Magician” Hughes performing a couple of nights at the Masters at Augusta National last week. There is a chance Hondo will be invited to do magic at the Presidents Cup in Jersey City, N.J., in September.
The Minnesota Golf Association is encouraging member clubs to abide by the new rule set forth by the U.S. Golf Association and the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews that eliminates penalty when a ball is accidentally moved on the putting green.
Ex-Gophers public address announcer Dick Jonckowski headlines a Mendota Heights Athletic Association baseball fundraiser on May 13 at O’Gara’s pub in St. Paul. Meanwhile, Jonckowski will make the ceremonial first pitch at Wednesday’s Twins-Cleveland game at Target Field.
Don’t print that
Forthcoming is an “I want answers” meeting between Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor and his front office-coaching staff, which will be asked to explain why the team didn’t win more than 31 games this season after winning just 29 last season.
“The 29 to 31 isn’t the improvement that I expected,” Taylor said. “I wish I had a better understanding of why that happened, but I don’t.”
It’s been five long years since Byron Buxton has been baseball’s top prospect. The Minnesota Twins center fielder admits he felt pressure to fulfill that potential.
“Most definitely,” Buxton, 23, in his third season in the major leagues. “No matter how many times I said it didn’t affect me, in the back of my head it did.” Buxton slashed a double against the White Sox on Saturday.
Plans are to replace current Wild backup goalie Darcy Kuemper, 26, who’ll end up elsewhere via free agency this summer, with South St. Paul native Alex Stalock, 29, who the Wild has signed to a two-year extension. The Wild front office is very comfortable with Stalock as backup to Devin Dubnyk, 30.
Despite averaging 25.1 points and 12.3 rebounds, Karl-Anthony Towns, the reigning NBA rookie of the year, didn’t make the league’s top-15 most popular jersey list, which has the Warriors’ Stephen Curry at No. 1 and the Trail Blazers’ Damian Lillard at No. 15.
It will be announced on Monday that St. Paul Saints starter Mark Hamburger will return for 2017.
Ex-Gophers football coach Jerry Kill, the new offensive coordinator at Rutgers, won’t face Minnesota until 2019 in New Brunswick, N.J.
“If that time comes, it will definitely be awkward — and unique,” Kill said last week.
Kill said the situation at Rutgers reminds him of Minnesota when he took the Gophers job seven years ago.
“As far as where we’re at player-wise, the first year — there’s a lot of very similar situations,” he said.
Kill, 55, remains emphatic that he won’t be a head coach again.
“I’m done being a head coach,” he said. “I know I’m sleeping pretty good because I’ve got to worry about just a few things. A head coach has to worry about a whole lot of things.”
Kill said he hasn’t had any health issues for a long time.
“I lost about 20, 25 pounds, and then I’ve kinda gotten back in a routine — there’s a lot of good places to eat around here, so I’ve put on about five or six pounds,” he said. “New Jersey has a way to do that because it’s got a lot of great places to eat. Not that Minnesota doesn’t.”
Uh-oh: The Timberwolves’ new logo, released last week, looks eerily similar to that of another plodding franchise, the Arizona Coyotes.
Six members of ex-Gophers men’s basketball coach Tubby Smith’s first-season Memphis team, including the top three scorers, are transferring after the 19-13 season.
The Twins, off to a 7-4 start, and the Arizona Diamondbacks, for whom ex-Twins manager Ron Gardenhire is bench coach and won seven of their first 11 games, are under new management that emphasizes analytic strategy in game preparations.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) has not renewed the contract of Seth Appert from Cottage Grove after 11 seasons. Appert has been named an assistant for the U.S. National men’s team that competes in the World Championship May 5-21 in Cologne, Germany, and Paris.
Overheard
Tim Laudner, 58, catcher for the 1987 Twins’ World Series champions, on the 30-year anniversary of the event this year: “We’re all finding out that, as important to us as it was then, it’s more important to all of us with each passing day. You take things (health) for granted for a while, then you realize it doesn’t make much sense to take things for granted.”
