This Day in Hockey History – December 17, 2000 – Wild Win Among Stars
Minnesota has loved hockey since the late 1800s, so the state felt a sense of loss when their NHL team moved to Dallas in 1993. Only four years later, Minnesotans got together and obtained a new franchise that would begin play in 2000. On December 17, 2000 at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, the new Minnesota Wild hosted the Dallas Stars (the 1999 Stanley Cup champions) for the first time.
Darby Hendrickson, forward for the Wild (later the team’s assistant coach), was raised in Minnesota, and his father worked with the North Stars in the late 1980s. “I was around and got to meet a number of North Stars because of my dad being a strength coach. You know some of those guys, there are a lot of North Stars that still live around here, so you are always going to respect them.” Hendrickson then played college hockey for the University of Minnesota Gophers. He commented how “everybody was shocked” about the NHL move after the North Stars had played in the Stanley Cup finals in 1991. “When the North Stars left there was a void for that, for kids to have role models that were at the pro level. Certainly I know our state loves college, Gopher hockey and all that, but the pro level is pretty special from that side, and that was a void that was missing.” After playing for the Toronto Maple Leafs, the New York Islanders, and the Vancouver Canucks, Hendrickson was drafted by the Wild in the 2000 Expansion Draft. He and Jeff Nielsen were the only Minnesotans on the initial team. “The Wild was new, there was something fresh and exciting about that, and that was taking off. But the history and the connection there … I think personally it was a big thing.” According to Hendrickson, “I think with Dallas that was really built up from the start of the year. Everybody was not only excited hockey came back, but they also wanted to see that Dallas game. I just remember the hype, and just so many connections from the Dallas team that hadn’t been that far to me.”
One of those connections was Mike Modano, who had been drafted by the North Stars in 1988 and moved to the Dallas Stars in 1993. Seven years later, he returned to Minnesota as the opponent, which he found “really tough. It was hard to come back, it was hard to play, and it was hard to really focus and concentrate.” “The hype was a lot,” he commented. “I knew that when we circled that date on the calendar leading up to it that it was going to be quite a night. Just waiting in the tunnel going out there the final four, five minutes before we headed out, it was like a Stanley Cup game. The buzz was amazing: the afternoon in the hotel, the lead-up to the pregame skate, and the whole thing. Fans were outside the hotel. Once we headed out to the ice, it was just bedlam. We knew it was going to be a tough building to play in that night.” In the end, he was correct that, “The result was probably pretty favorable for the Minnesota fans.”
For the game itself, a ceremonial first puck was dropped by former Minnesota Governor Arne Carlson. With a record crowd of 18,834, the Wild saw their 17th straight sellout (tying for the expansion team record). Everyone for the Wild (Hendrickson, coach Jacques Lemaire, and radio broadcaster Bob Kurtz) could feel the crowd’s excitement. Coach Lemaire commented, “We could feel it in the locker room. And the fact that we scored got them excited, too. We could sense how much the fans wanted us to win this one.” Both Hendrickson and Kurtz described Neal Broten’s presentation. According to Kurtz, “Neal Broten went up on stage to do the ‘let’s play hockey’ tradition they had. He was wearing a Dallas sweater. He took it off and had a North Stars sweater underneath. Everybody went nuts.” Hendrickson added, “That just kind of set the tone for the whole night.”
The Wild lived up to the hype without allowing the Stars to respond. After scoring twice in under a minute during the first period, Minnesota scored twice more in each of the remaining two periods. Hendrickson thought, “They probably weren’t as fired up or felt the energy we did. And everything just kind of went our way. And we got better, and they got more frustrated, and it was just the timing of the night. It was fun to be a part of.” The new Minnesota team beat the former Minnesota franchise 6-0. It was, as Kurtz stated, “The real homecoming back for the Stars.”
The man who kept the Wild on top that night was Manny Fernandez, who had been Dallas’s backup goalie the year before. He made 24 saves for his second shutout of the season and broke his former team’s year-long streak of scoring every game. Fernandez chose focus over friendships, commenting later, “I decided that today was going to be war time. This wasn’t a time for friends.” He used what he knew of Dallas’s strategies to block them. His former coach, Ken Hitchcock admitted, “Manny made some big second and third saves, but it was an easy night. This game was over in the first period.”
True Minnesotan Hendrickson summarized, “It was fun to be around those different chapters, from opening night, to Dallas, to in year three we were in the playoffs. It was an incredible group the early years. And the city, the support, the surrounding part of Saint Paul made it awesome.”
Additional Sources:
- Brian McFarlane, Brian McFarlane’s History of Hockey (Champaign, Ill.: Sports Publishing Inc., c1997), 94-95.
- Stephen Laroche, Changing the Game: A History of NHL Expansion (Toronto: ECW Press, 2014).
- Kirk McKnight, The Voices of Hockey: Broadcasters Reflect on the Fastest Game on Earth (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 95-96.
- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/stars-cant-go-home-again/
- https://www.nhl.com/wild/news/first-wild-and-stars-game-elevated-the-stakes/c-793198
