PITTSBURGH — It was Oct. 30, the score was 1-1 after two periods, and the message in the home locker room heading into the third period against the Pittsburgh Penguins was simple enough: “Just win a period.”
The Minnesota Wild then came out and gave up three goals during a flat period to end a flat month — the worst October in franchise history — with a ninth loss in 12 games.
It was the perfect time for a closed-door, players-only, tear-the-effin’-paint-off-the-wall team meeting. While a few choice words were indeed flung around, the locker-room doors opened to the media atypically fast because captain Jared Spurgeon had something more unique in mind.
“Spurgey told me that he wanted to just have something the next day, and that’s how it went,” alternate captain Marcus Foligno said. “Spurgey threw on the text message group, ‘Hey, we’re going to have a meeting before practice and just the players, and we’re going to hash things out.’ So, yeah, that was all him.”
Often it’s cliched to credit a players-only meeting once there’s a season turnaround, but there’s no denying the Wild have looked like a different team starting with their 5-2 pounding of the Vancouver Canucks a day after Spurgeon gathered his teammates before a hard-working Oct. 31 practice.
Since Nov. 1, the Wild are a league-best 7-1-1 (15 of a possible 18 points).
Defensively, after an October when they were dreadful, they’re second-best in November, allowing 1.89 goals per game and posting the eighth-best penalty kill (87 percent). They have the fifth-most hits in that span (195), fifth-most blocked shots (149) and second-best save percentage (.937). Offensively, they’re tied for 12th with 3.0 goals per game and have scored first in a franchise-record 10 consecutive games after an October when it felt they trailed every second of every game.
THE WALL OF ST. PAUL!! 🟢 pic.twitter.com/dWzKYbgSFz
— NHL (@NHL) November 20, 2025
In other words, they got back to their hard-working, hard-checking, north-south identity.
Players’ meetings are confidential. Players are loath to let loose what’s said inside those closed walls.
That’s why Matt Boldy, after scoring his first career shorthanded goal and seventh career shootout-deciding goal in Wednesday’s win over Carolina, wasn’t going to bite when asked to divulge just a little bit: “Yeah, it was good. It was a good meeting.”
Luckily for us, Foligno, Spurgeon and defenseman Brock Faber did give The Athletic a little taste.
“A lot of the message was just everyone’s intentions are right in this room, and it’s just getting back to things you can control,” Faber said. “Like, I can’t control whether I have five shots on goal, five opportunities to jump in the rush, five chances a game. I can’t control that. Things I can control are the way I box out, the way I compete, the way I gap, and then the rest is already written. So getting back to our identity and trusting the guy next to you was obviously the thing.
“The deeper message was more so just, ‘Everyone has the right intentions in here and let’s just f—ing lean into what makes each individual good and it’ll come together. It was a good reset for us. It was very positive. Very positive in that room. We knew the team we had, and we pushed through it.”
🫎 in THE HAT pic.twitter.com/zLw0LtdBvh
— Minnesota Wild (@mnwild) November 17, 2025
Spurgeon, a Wild lifer since his 21st birthday 15 years ago, may seem like a quiet captain on the outside, and he largely is. However, he’s beloved by his teammates and is as inclusive as anybody who’s ever put on a Wild sweater. He makes everybody feel a part of it, so when he speaks, it means something.
And on that Oct. 31 morning, Spurgeon wasn’t the only player to speak up, nor his alternate captains, Foligno and Kirill Kaprizov.
“A lot of guys spoke up, and it was a great message, and obviously, it changed a lot of things for us,” Faber said. “It just sucks when you’re losing like that. You come to the rink gloomy, and you come to the rink — it feels like everything in your life sucks. And that positivity kind of lifted us all.”
Foligno said Spurgeon was worried about the frustration he was witnessing. Teammates were slamming doors, breaking sticks and cursing each other out.
“Spurgey started the meeting and told everybody, ‘You’ve got to calm down a little bit,’” Foligno said. “Guys were just a little bit trying to do things themselves, myself included. I think we all wanted to have a great start again, like last season, and the way, I think, individuals played, everybody was on their own page, and I just thought that we weren’t really connected as a group.
“We weren’t doing the little things the right way, and just sometimes you just need a reset. (Coach John Hynes) is going to say what he has to say, but from a guy like Spurgey, it might just have a little bit more.”
Players needed to be reminded that it’s a fun game, Foligno added. “So it was almost like, ‘Just relax and get some new oxygen in your system.’ And we came out roaring after that.”
Spurgeon has been part of many players-only meetings over the years and has led many. But sometimes, when you start screaming immediately after the game, “you can let things fly off your chest and you’re just throwing words around and guys go home insulted and offended,” he said.
So Spurgeon decided to go home, digest the Penguins’ game, think about the first month of the season, get some ideas together and hold a meeting that would have some substance to it.
“I wanted to have a meaningful meeting so we could air out what everybody was thinking,” Spurgeon said. “So it was all positive from the group inside and the belief we had, and we just had to lock in a bit. I think we were a bit loose and it was early. That’s what sucks about going through something like that right away is that everything is magnified because everybody’s focused on having a good start of the season.
“Obviously, you have no wins to rely on, so the teams that go through that in the middle of the year, no one really notices. But we have high expectations out of ourselves, we needed to remember who we were and we’ve been playing a lot better ever since.”
Spurgeon said he didn’t realize the Wild were 7-1-1 since that meeting and isn’t overly gratified that, so far, it worked.
“The thing about our group is our guys really care so much, we want to win so bad, and sometimes when you want to win so bad and you’re not, you start doing almost too much and you try to take on everything yourself and do more than you need to rather than just trusting the guy next to you,” Spurgeon said. “Now? I think you can see that even with all the injuries we have, every single line is playing well, every single D-man is playing well and the goalies are playing great. That’s the way we want it to go. In other words, the message of the meeting was, ‘Let’s do it together.’”
And the thing about Spurgeon is he always backs up his words with his play. Spurgeon hasn’t been on the ice for a five-on-five goal against in nearly 160 minutes, with the Wild having a 7-0 goal advantage with him on the ice in that stretch. Kaprizov is playing his best hockey of the year, as is Foligno, who has been much better defensively and is making an impact with bone-crushing checks.
“Our leaders on this team are our leaders for a reason,” Faber said. “They’ve been through stretches like that. What I loved about the meeting is it wasn’t something that they just planned out of nowhere and everyone just ripped into each other. It was thought about. It was thoughtful, it was meaningful.”
BROCK FABER pic.twitter.com/kVfOVhKiun
— Spoked Z (@SpokedZ) November 20, 2025
Faber, especially, has been a different defenseman since that meeting after a tough start to the year. He’s been exceptional on both sides of the ice, scoring four goals and 10 points in the past 12 games with a plus-2 after no points and a minus-5 in his first nine games.
“I think there’s still improving I need to do,” he said. “I’m happy with how it’s gone, but I know that I need to get better and I know that I can keep getting better. I know that I have better in me, but when you have a bounce-back game or two, you get that feeling. ‘I’m back.’
“I feel confident again. That was the first time I went through something like that in my career where I was so, so frustrated with myself, couldn’t seem to get out of it and finally reset. I figured it out and I feel good.”
