The last time Wild fans saw their team in person, it was on the tail end of a five-game winning streak. Minnesota lost its first game to Vancouver on the road trip, stopping that winning streak in its tracks.
Still the Wild won five of seven games overall, including each of its past three games. Minnesota's 24 points are two fewer than League-leading and division-leading Nashville, despite the fact the Wild has played 10 of its 17 games this season on the road.
Minnesota will play six of its next seven games and seven of its next nine on friendly ice before the next road trip longer than one game takes place during the first week of December.
"We're coming back here knowing that we took care of business on the road," said Wild forward Marcus Foligno. "This is a place where we love playing, we just gotta make sure we have a great homestand."
In order to get that stretch of home games off on the right foot, the Wild will have to overcome the natural inclination that most teams in the NHL deal with in the first game at home following a long road trip.
Whether it's the travel finally catching up or the pressures of playing in front of the home crowd, teams typically struggle the first game back.
There's lots of different theories why, but the Wild says it needs to do its best not to buy into any of them.
"There's fatigue put into the road and our travel sort of speaks for itself," Foligno said. "Not to make any excuses, but when you just come off the road, starts really seem to hurt teams. Our first period has to be dialed. It's almost like a back-to-back; the start might not be there, but your second and third might be there.
"It's kind of a saying around the League, it's always tough to play that first game back. But we have to make sure that's not the case tonight."
The Capitals are in the opposite boat. Washington has played its past five games at home and its hitting the road for a week-long road trip that continues Wednesday against the Winnipeg Jets before going to Denver on Friday and Montreal on Monday.
Washington lost the final two games of its homestand to Columbus and Arizona and is sure to want to start its road trip off on a positive note.
"We're not playing a junior team," said Wild coach Bruce Boudreau. "We're playing the best team in the League until someone knocks them off their perch."
Here are the projected lineups:
WILD
Jason Zucker - Eric Staal - Mikael Granlund
Zach Parise - Mikko Koivu - Nino Niederreiter
Jordan Greenway - Joel Eriksson Ek - Charlie Coyle
Marcus Foligno - Eric Fehr - JT Brown
Ryan Suter - Matt Dumba
Jonas Brodin - Jared Spurgeon
Nick Seeler - Greg Pateryn
Devan Dubnyk
Alex Stalock
CAPITALS
Alex Ovechkin - Evgeny Kuznetsov - Tom Wilson
Jakub Vrana - Nicklas Backstrom - T.J. Oshie
Andre Burakovsky - Lars Eller - Brett Connolly
Chandler Stephenson - Travis Boyd - Devante Smith-Pelly
Dmitry Orlov - John Carlson
Michal Kempny - Matt Niskanen
Christian Djoos - Madison Bowey
Pheonix Copley
Braden Holtby
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- Wild Warmup: Minnesota vs. Washington
- Wild to celebrate Military Appreciation Night on Tuesday
