"Speaking softly but forcefully, Wild coach Mike Yeo refused to mince words Thursday night after his team lost 5-2 to Vancouver to drop out of the top eight teams in the NHL's Western Conference.

"We flat-out stink the last two months. We stink," Yeo said. "And we come in and we don't have a good enough effort from too many guys.

"I'm concerned about the fact that we come into games and we don't have enough guys, when we should have absolute desperation in our game playing against a team like this, and we have too many guys that aren't ready to pay a price."

Yeo fell silent for a moment.

He could offer almost no upside to the events of an evening in which captain Mikko Koivu returned to the Minnesota lineup after missing eight games because of a shoulder injury and combined with Devin Setoguchi and Dany Heatley on a line that produced both goals and nine of the Wild's 24 shots on goal.

"When Mikko's line was out there, we were good," Yeo said. "There wasn't much going on after that."

Yeo's visible anger was mirrored in the Minnesota dressing room, where forward Cal Clutterbuck stalked away with a terse "No comment."

Setoguchi, wrestling to pull a T-shirt over his head before talking to the media, uttered a loud curse when the shirt snagged on equipment hanging behind him.

He finally took a breath and noted that the Wild managed only five shots on goal through the first 29 minutes of play. By then, the Canucks led 3-1 and the Xcel Energy Center

crowd of 17,859 was growing restless. "