"I couldn't really protect against anything else," Staal said. "And then when you're in there, it happens really fast and then you get everybody on the ice asking you a lot of questions and you're just trying to process everything that's going on and you're just trying to answer the questions honestly of what I was feeling at that moment.
"I think I scared my wife a little bit. She came down right after and I*
"I'm still real disappointed," Staal said. "For me personally, I wish … I would have liked to have been better throughout the series. We needed some offense, we needed some goals. I was a key guy this year in doing that, and I wasn't able to … I felt like I created some looks, created chances throughout the series, but for whatever reason they didn't hit the back of the net as they had been previously. So I was disappointed in a lot of different ways as to how it all finished."
Wild forward Mikael Granlund played the series with a broken hand sustained blocking a shot during Game 1. General manager Chuck Fletcher said recovery time is expected to be 4-6 weeks.
"It's going to heal on its own," Granlund said. "It's that time of the year where I just thought I'd play through it. I could play with that. I had no problems with that, just a little sore. Everybody has something going on. It's just a part of playing. I don't want to make any excuses about that."
Granlund, 25, had two assists and led Wild forwards with an average ice time per game of 20:32 despite the injury. He had an NHL career-high 69 points (26 goals, 43 assists) during the regular season and can become a restricted free agent July 1.
