Pretty much everyone emerged exhausted from the Minnesota Wild’s Game 3 playoff marathon with the Dallas Stars. When the visitors’ scored a power play goal in the second overtime, and claimed both a 4-3 victory and a 2-1 lead in the series, it was 12:53 a.m. on a Thursday morning, and the actual game had gone on for more than 92 minutes of playing time.
Fans, broadcasters, vendors and everyone who had stayed up late to watch from home were ready to call it a night. But the guy who had logged a Wild franchise record in on-ice time was ready to keep playing.
“I feel good. I mean, just try to take care of yourself. Brock (Faber) makes it easy sometimes, too. And we’re playing a pretty good system. We’re doing it as a five-man unit,” Wild defenseman Quinn Hughes said after playing a career-high 43 minutes, 47 seconds on the ice. “ Honestly, I kind of felt better in the second overtime and the first overtime than the third (period). I was tired in the third, but felt I got my legs again after that.”
Since Hughes arrived from Vancouver in a December blockbuster trade, Wild fans have gotten used to him on the ice pretty much any time the puck is dropped and the clock is running. In his final 10 regular-season games, Hughes logged fewer than 25 minutes of ice time just once — 24:48 in a victory over his former Canucks teammates on April 2.
In the first two games of the playoffs, both of which ended in regulation, he averaged more than 26 minutes on the ice.
Asked about the risk of over-playing one of the NHL’s marquee blueliners, Wild coach John Hynes said there is little concern about Hughes’ workload.
“When you have the puck as much as you do, it’s not as taxing,” Hynes said prior to Game 4 at Grand Casino Arena on Saturday.
“He’s in great shape, and some of these elite players, I mean, they’re drive-trained. Their engines, they’re different than the average player or the average person,” the coach added. “He takes care of himself. I think he understands when he has to go, when he doesn’t have to go. The thing I find with him, too, is sometimes when those shifts get there, a lot of times when you watch him, it’s when he’s in some attack situation. It could be in transition, it could be the ‘O’ zone where he feels like he can exploit something, and I think that’s why it allows him sometimes to be in those situations.”
Hughes entered Game 4 with a three-game playoff points streak, which was a franchise record for a defenseman.
The offensive side of Hughes’ game is the reason he has been named the top defenseman in the NHL in the past, why he was a collegiate star at Michigan, and why he earned a gold medal in February, scoring the overtime winner in Team USA’s medal round opener versus Sweden.
Hughes and his younger brother Jack — who scored the golden goal versus Canada in the Olympic finale — were media darlings upon their return from Italy, jetting two and from New York City twice to appear on “Saturday Night Live” and “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”
That turn in the national spotlight was in stark contrast to Hughes’ reserved nature. He is quiet on the bench, and speaks to the media in straightforward, matter-of-fact sentences, with little hyperbole and an even keel. That’s very unlike his on-ice game, with his moves that are often eye-popping.
“He’s not overly active. He’s active with his defensive partner. He’s active with Brock. I think he’ll talk to (assistant coach Jack Capuano) a little bit,” Hynes said. “I don’t have much communication with him; I will at times, but it’s whether I have to say something to him or he has to say something to me. But I would say regularly he analyzes the game.”
“He’s not a huge talker, no,” Hynes added, “but when he does talk, he’s got something to say of substance.”
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