2002-03 Wild team made its mark by playing with a chip on its shoulder

ST. PAUL - There's a moment that sticks out when former Minnesota Wild fan favorite Wes Walz thinks about the magical 2002-03 season.

And, no, it's not Andrew Brunette's overtime game-winner in Game 7 of the first-round series against the Colorado Avalanche.

Walz remembers something else because, as he puts it, if he and his teammates had their way back then, they wouldn't have played the Avalanche at all.

After wrapping up the regular season with a win over the Columbus Blue Jackets at home, Walz and a few of his teammates took a stroll over to the St. Paul Grill. A nice dinner was in order, as the Wild had secured the first playoff berth in franchise history, as a No. 6 seed.

"I remember we played an afternoon game and when the games started that night we still weren't sure who we were going to play," Walz said. "A bunch of us went out to dinner with our wives and we talked and the only team we didn't want to play was Colorado. Then, of course, we hooked them in the first round."

"Yeah, that was definitely the team" we didn't want to play, added Brad Bombardir, now as the Wild's director of player development. "Just looking up and down their lineup we were like, 'Oh, jeez. I don't know if we match up well against this team.' "

While the Wild were an expansion team in their third year of existence, the Avalanche had hall of famers aplenty: Peter Forsberg and Joe Sakic on the front line, Rob Blake on the back end and Patrick Roy between the pipes.

As Wild fans knows, none of that mattered. Trailing 3-1 in the first-round series, the Wild rattled off three straight wins to stun the Avalanche before overcoming another 3-1 deficit to shock the Vancouver Canucks in a seven-game second-round series.

The clock finally struck midnight on the Wild in the Western Conference finals when they were swept by the Anaheim Mighty Ducks and ace goaltender Jean-Sébastien Giguère.

There have been more-talented Wild teams since then - last year's group comes to mind, and maybe this season's team, which opens the season at Detroit on Thursday night, Oct. 5 - yet none has come close to similar success.

So, what was so special about that 2002-03 team?

"I don't know if there's a clear-cut answer to that question," said Richard Park, a right winger on that team who is now a Wild development coach. "It was just a group of guys that felt like they had something to prove. We were players who had to be resilient throughout our careers to even get to that point, and I think that was what fueled us whenever we were down."

A fast start

After finishing with losing records in its first two seasons in the NHL, the Wild were easy to dismiss as the 2002-03 campaign got underway. As most former players remember, that happened a lot back then.

"I think early in the season, for sure, teams thought it was going to be an easy game against us," Bombardir said.

And yet, Wild started the season 6-1-1.

"Everyone started to gain confidence, and it kind of took off from there," Brunette said. "We would play tight when teams were expecting easy games against us and then we were able to counterpunch them because of that."

That frustrating style of play drummed up by mastermind coach Jacques Lemaire meant there was no such thing as an easy game.

"There were some teams that probably took us lightly and thought, 'Oh, this is still an expansion team so it's going to be a big night offensively,' " Brunette said. "Then we would frustrate them with the way we played. The season really solidified our identity as a team."

That identity came from Lemaire, who Brunette described as "a brilliant mind" who always seemed to know what buttons to push.

"He would do different things throughout the season that brought the team closer and closer together," Brunette said. "We all knew we were all going to get it at some point from Jacque so we all rallied around each other. He did some things that we might not have agreed with and probably in his crazy mind he knew we would rally around it."

"You had to prove your worth to stay in the lineup with Jacque," added Darby Hendrickson, now an assistant coach with the Wild. "I remember he pulled Antti Laaksonen out after he had one of the longest (games started) streaks going, for three years or something like that. That was Jacque. That definitely made us closer."

And better.

As the season progressed and the Wild continued to hang around the top teams, they still struggled to gain the respect from the rest of the league. As a No. 6 seed entering the playoffs, not many pundits gave the Wild a chance to win even a game against the Northwest Division champion Avalanche, let alone with the series.

"I don't think we felt like we got much respect from the league from different teams," Brunette said. "That was the driving force for us, and that's kind of what propelled that team. There were a lot of guys that played with that chip on their shoulder."

While there were some budding stars on that team - 20-year-old Marian Gaborik had 30 goals and 35 assists that season - most players on the roster had been given a second chance of because of league expansion.

That also helped shape the identity of the team.

"We had a lot of players in our locker room that believed they were better players than anyone gave us credit for," Walz said. "And expansion gave us a chance to say, 'You made a mistake on letting me go.' That was a common thread that held us together. We were all kind of minor-league guys until the league expanded, and that belief turned into confidence, and it snowballed from there."

A lasting legacy

When the playoffs finally rolled around, the Wild had to find a way to balance simply being happy to be there with being ready to take down the Avalanche.

"I think once the season was over there was a sense of, 'We made the playoffs. What an accomplishment,' " Walz said. "Not only did we make the playoffs, we were a No. 6 seed. It's not like we scraped our way in, so we were really excited about that."

After a slow start in the opening-round series, the Wild soon realized they could play with the Avalanche.

"It took a few games, actually, for us to feel comfortable," Bombardir added. "We had some opportunities early in that series, so I think we started to regain the mind-set that we had played with all season long."

Trailing three games to one, the Wild found a way to win Game 5 on the road. They followed that up by winning Game 6 at home - on an overtime goal by Park. Then Brunette's overtime game-winner finished off the series in Game 7.

"If we're talking about an individual moment, then yeah, that was for sure the highlight," Brunette said. "It doesn't get any better than that. You grow up in the backyard dreaming of that stuff."

After another dramatic comeback against the Canucks in the next round, though, the Wild were swept by the Mighty Ducks, unable to solve Giguère, who only allowed one goal in the entire series.

"We wish we had another crack at Game 1 of that series," Hendrickson said. "Who knows what happens if we would've won Game 1. If we win that game maybe we get through Anaheim and we go on and win the whole thing. You always look back on that. We wish we could've gotten out of the gate a little better."

Nonetheless, the Wild will always have the memories of that season, despite the way it ended.

"I don't know if we could've forecasted something like that with an organization being so young and not having established itself throughout the league," Park said. "I don't think anyone, including ourselves, really expected us to have that kind of success. It was a really special bunch."

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the run that bonded the community to the franchise was that it took many players awhile to realize the impact of what they had done.

On game nights, "we would go to the rink at 4 o'clock and the building isn't crazy outside quite yet ... and then after the games when we went home and got ready for the next game it was kind of quiet outside because it was a couple of hours after the game," Walz said. "We really had no clue how big it was until after it was over. It didn't matter where I went for three or four months after the playoffs were over, I had people coming up to me giving me hugs. That was the best time of our lives."