The Wild hit 1,000 wins faster than anyone, and they are speeding up
Minnesota needed 1,995 games, beating Philadelphia's old mark by 23, and four Wild skaters carry seven-game point streaks into Saturday.
The Minnesota Wild got to 1,000 wins faster than any franchise in NHL history, and the unsettling part for everybody else is that this team looks built to pile on, not to coast past a milestone.
Friday's 4-1 win over San Jose was win No. 1,000 in the franchise's 1,995th regular-season game. Philadelphia held the mark at 2,018 games. Nashville got there in 2,020 in January 2025.
Minnesota beat both by more than 20 games, and it did it with a franchise that spent a lot of its first two decades being sensible rather than scary.
The number that matters more
Here's ours. By our count, four Wild skaters are riding seven-game point streaks at once: Kirill Kaprizov, Quinn Hughes, Matt Boldy and Joel Eriksson Ek, per NHL data. That's not one hot hand; it's the entire top of the lineup contributing every night for two consecutive weeks.
Kaprizov has 16 goals and 30 points in 18 games, and the 16 lead the league. He scored on a 5-on-3 Friday and set up the other three. He's already the club's all-time leader with 246 goals.
Hughes is the engine. He's averaging 28 minutes a night by our count, and Friday he became the fourth-fastest defenseman to 100 multi-assist games, behind Bobby Orr, Paul Coffey and Denis Potvin. That's a short list with a lot of hardware on it.
"Can't say it enough, I just feel like we can tilt the ice when they're out there," Hughes said of the top line.
Why this one is different
The Wild are 12-3-3, best in the West and second in the league. They're 6-0-1 in their last seven. They're 10-0-3 when they score first, and the power play is converting 26.2 percent by our count.
The old Wild model was structure and goaltending, a team that made the playoffs and then ran into somebody with more skill. This version has the skill.
A franchise winger and a franchise defenseman in their primes is a combination most organizations wait decades for, and Jesper Wallstedt stopped 23 of 24 shots Friday to keep the boring part of the job boring.
Small sample, sure, at 18 games. But a team that wins when its stars score and wins when it scores first is a team that's hard to beat on a bad night.
The call
The milestone makes an entertaining trivia answer. The streak is the story.
Minnesota plays Tampa Bay on Saturday on the second night of a back-to-back, with Michael McCarron questionable after leaving Friday's game.
Our call: the Wild finish November with the most points in the Western Conference, and the 1,000-win team starts getting talked about as a 2027 contender instead of a nice regular-season club.
