Wild proves its mettle on a different kind of ice

ST. PAUL -- And to think ... these guys make their living on the ice.
Hockey players are some of the best athletes in the world, but that doesn't mean they always excel at sports outside of what happens on a 200x80 sheet inside an 18,000-seat arena.
A team bonding trip to the St. Paul Curling Club on Thursday proved that much.

Wild players, coaches and support staff bumped practice up 90 minutes at TRIA Rink in order to get to the club by 10:30, where for many, it was the first time they had ever curled in their lives.
Kirill Kaprizov said he's barely even seen curling on TV before.
Others, like Wild defenseman Alex Goligoski, have curled on several occasions. On many occasions growing up, Goligoski said he's spent time at the Itasca Curling Club in his hometown of Grand Rapids, which made him one of the better and more experienced players of the bunch on Thursday.

"Not the best form on some, but the guys figured it out pretty quick," Goligoski said. "It's a tough game, but I thought the guys looked good."
With the Winter Olympic Games in full swing in Beijing, it seems like curling is front and center on people's minds every four years or so. But curling is actually one of the fastest growing sports in the country.
As recently as a decade ago, the St. Paul Curling Club was the only dedicated club in the Twin Cities area. Now there are five, with a handful of others coming planned over the next few years.
But on this day, these professionals couldn't be any further from competing at the Olympics. Some of them, like Brandon Duhaime, are just trying to stay upright. A little too giddy while attempting to sweep one teammate's stone, Duhaime lost his footing and was nearly parallel to the ice before somehow getting his feet back under himself.
For a kid from Florida, he wasn't too bad.
"I scored one point," Duhaime exclaimed proudly to Wild captain Jared Spurgeon as the competitors exited the ice.
Spurgeon's team was on the short end of a 9-1 drubbing on the sheet, although it wasn't without some controversy. Finnish goaltender Kaapo Kahkonen, one of the better curlers on the team, seemed to be throwing a larger proportion of the stones for his team in the win.
"It was fun, something a lot of guys haven't done before and you realize just how hard it is," Spurgeon said. "Just to get away from the rink, hang out and do something different ... we hang out every day with each other, but it's good to get away from the rink and it's a bit more relaxed.
Also competing in this game was rookie forwards Matt Boldy and Connor Dewar.
Boldy, from Boston, was curling for the first time, while Dewar, a Canadian, was one of the better players on the team.
"Bolds is good at everything though," Dewar says with a laugh.
These kinds of outings have been more rare in recent years as COVID-19 has put these midseason retreats on hold. But they are critical part of good teams.

After spending nearly a week away from each another for the All-Star break, the Wild is about to see a whole heck of a lot of one another over the next couple of months. Its final 40 games of the regular season will be jammed into just 77 days on the calendar, meaning lots of games with rest days mixed in, and not much time for team bonding away from the rink.
"It's fun to get away from the rink with the guys. It's refreshing," Goligoski said. "A lot of the time when you're there it's business ... it's fun too, but you're practicing and working on your game and stuff. But to get outside of that environment and just have it be a fun thing, I think it's big for everybody."
Photo by Dan Myers