ST. LOUIS – Marc-Andre Fleury, wearing his black Wild baseball cap backward, had a front-row seat to history Tuesday night, but he was the one who planted the seed in Filip Gustavsson’s head in the first place.
Then, as if Fleury diagramed the play for his goalie partner himself, the St. Louis Blues’ Pavel Buchnevich cooperated fully with a perfectly placed 79-foot shot directly toward the Wild logo at the center of Gustavsson’s chest.
Gustavsson caught the puck with his trapper for his 27th save, dropped it in his blue crease, took aim and sailed a beauty the length of the ice for a bull’s-eye — the final goal in a 4-1 Wild win.
It was the first goalie goal in team history and Gustavsson is the 15th goaltender in NHL regular season history to score a goalie goal.
“That was unexpected,” goalie coach Freddy Chabot said at the press elevator after the game.
“That was awesome,” general manager Bill Guerin said. “You don’t see a goalie goal every day.”
“A power-play goal,” pointed out assistant GM Michael Murray.
GOALIE GOAL! GOALIE GOAL! GOALIE GOAL! 🚨 pic.twitter.com/NS3CsKb9ge
— NHL (@NHL) October 16, 2024
With 34 seconds left in the Blues’ home opener and St. Louis trying to kill a double minor, coach Drew Bannister called timeout seeking a miracle with his team down two.
Fleury had other plans.
“I called a quick goalie meeting,” Fleury said, laughing.
Gustavsson skated over to the bench and got some advice from the wise future Hall of Famer.
“Flower looked up to the board and was like, ‘We’re up two goals. You should probably try it if you get the chance. You’re shooting, right?’” Gustavsson recalled. “I was like, ‘Yeah, maybe I should.’”
Gustavsson had never scored a goal at any level of hockey. He’d never consider it with a one-goal lead because if he missed, it would be an icing and an offensive-zone faceoff for the Blues.
“Up 2-nothing, I was like, ‘Yeah, if I get the chance, I’ll try it,’” Gustavsson said.
And then he got his chance.
Gustavsson figures Buchnevich was shooting the puck directly at him so he’d catch it, freeze it and give the Blues a late faceoff. But instead, Buchnevich “just put it straight in the glove and I tried and put it down as quick as I could,” Gustavsson said. “It just laid perfect there on the ice, and I just try and shoot it as hard as I could.”
As Fleury said, “Textbook.”
Celebrating the first goalie goal in @mnwild history! 🤩 pic.twitter.com/X5ciE7FTea
— NHL (@NHL) October 16, 2024
Chabot, the Wild’s goalie coach of five seasons, likes to do fun things with his goaltenders in practice.
One of the coolest looking is when he’ll have one goalie stand directly in front of the other to set one ginormous screen. Chabot will then whistle dead-accurate shots to the left, then to the right, then back to the left … over and over and over again on either side of the screening goalie so the one in the crease has to fight to find the puck.
But the most fun drill he conducts is goalie goals.
Former Wild goalie Kaapo Kahkonen was a goalie goal machine in his native Finland. Current Wild prospect Jesper Wallstedt, a fellow Swede like Gustavsson, has scored goalie goals, too, including with Iowa in the AHL.
“I expected that from Wally,” Chabot said. “Not Gus.”
What shocked Chabot the most was that he has never seen Gustavsson in any of their practices shoot the puck as high as he did.
“I usually complain about my curve not being the right angle to get it that high,” Gustavsson said. “But I don’t know, extra powers or something.”
Most cool, according to ESPN, this was the third power-play goal by a goalie in NHL history (Evgeni Nabokov in 2002 and Martin Brodeur in 2013). He’s the second Swede to ever score a goalie goal, according to NHL Stats (Linus Ullmark in 2023).
Hilariously, Guerin walked into the locker room to congratulate Gustavsson, then asked Fleury if he had ever scored one. Fleury knew full well his former Penguins teammate knew he had not, then cracked up and threw a towel at the Wild boss.
After he scored, Gustavsson was mobbed by his teammates on the ice — Brock Faber, Jonas Brodin, Marcus Foligno, Yakov Trenin and Marat Khusnutdinov.
Jakub Lauko’s first Wild goal is a shorthanded beauty. 2-0 #mnwild pic.twitter.com/gLS19TpTcs
— Spoked Z (@SpokedZ) October 16, 2024
Jakub Lauko, who scored the game-winning short-handed goal in the second period for his first goal with the Wild, wanted to join the pile from the bench. There were only nine seconds left in the game, but he figured it was against the rules and decided to stay put.
Luckily for him, Gustavsson skated to the bench and did a fist-bump flyby with his blocker. The first person he greeted was a smiling, proud Fleury.
“Props to him,” Lauko said. “It’s pretty impressive, and he deserves it. It would have been nicer at home, with a full barn, but you know it’s an incredible moment. I’m just happy for him.”
Gustavsson’s goal was the Wild’s fourth power-play goal of the season. He joked that he wanted to help push the power play over 20 percent, but he actually pushed it to 30.8 percent.
“Should probably be in the power play meetings now,” Gustavsson said.
Wild coach John Hynes has seen a goalie goal before. While coaching Nashville, Pekka Rinne scored one in Chicago.
“It was one of my first couple games in Nashville,” he recalled. “But it was almost very similar to Gus’s. It was kind of a six-on-five situation and kind of dumped in on the goalie and he had time to be able to do it and you could tell both guys … were going for it. Great to see.”
With the Wild playing seven defensemen and not playing again until in Columbus on Saturday, Kirill Kaprizov logged 27:59 of ice time — the second-most in his NHL career. According to ESPN, it was the sixth-most by a forward who had no shots in a game since 2000-01.
But Kaprizov was terrific, having two beautiful assists on goals by Ryan Hartman and Marco Rossi. He leads 2-0-2 Minnesota, which hasn’t trailed in any game, with six points.
Kaprizov has one goal, however, and volunteered that he’s tied in goals with the Wild’s No. 1 goalie: “Same (number of) goals like a lot of guys.”
“It’s probably not gonna be for long,” Gustavsson said.
The irony about Tuesday is before the season, it’s believed the Wild had the Blues game slated for Wallstedt’s season debut. But the Wild are inundated with injuries to Joel Eriksson Ek, Jared Spurgeon and Marcus Johansson, so Wallstedt had to be sent to Iowa to make room for callup Daemon Hunt. Plus, Gustavsson is playing so well, they need Wallstedt to get some practices and game action somewhere and right now it can’t be Minnesota.
The Wild want to get Wallstedt more games in the NHL this season than the three he got last year, but the name of the game is winning and if Gustavsson keeps racking up victories, he should get the bulk of the playing time.
If the Wild want to get back into the playoffs this season, they need the “Gus Bus” to look and play like the goalie of two years ago who finished with the second-best save percentage and goals-against average in the NHL and not the one that floundered last season to a sub-.900 save percentage.
So far in three starts, he’s 2-0-1 with a 1.66 goals-against average and .948 save percentage. He worked hard this offseason, came back to Minnesota in tip-top shape and has improved upon his practice habits.
“I don’t think I do anything special out there,” he said. “(I’m not) flashy. Obviously, I make some bigger saves, but that’s usually when you’re out of position. I just try to be in the right position most of the time and make boring saves. And I think that’s been working very good so far.”
Good, like in the second period after Lauko’s short-handed goal where he preserved a 2-0 lead by sprawling across his crease to rob Jordan Kyrou.
“Obviously we all know at the end of last year (Gustavsson) wasn’t happy and no one was happy with what had gone on,” Hynes said. “He put some hard work in this summer and he’s come back in I think the right mindset and learned his lessons from last year and now he’s come in and he’s playing real solid and you need that.
“Early in the year sometimes it’s tough to win if you don’t get strong goaltending because the games are a little bit scattered as everyone’s trying to get used to the NHL pace, there’s sometimes breakdowns, systems aren’t totally dialed in where they need to be so when you can get really quality goaltending early, it gives you the best chance to win.”
Goalie goals help, too.
Gus making Wild history 👏 pic.twitter.com/lnjSeLQikN
— Minnesota Wild (@mnwild) October 16, 2024
(Photo: Dilip Vishwanat / Getty Images)