"Coach Mike Yeo canceled Wild practice Friday morning and held a long meeting with his players, just 13 hours after he publicly called them out for their play in a 5-2 loss to the Vancouver Canucks at the Xcel Energy Center.

Practice, Yeo said, is not what this team needs.

"We've been the best practice team in the league for two months," he said. "We need to be gamers now."

The loss to Vancouver was Minnesota's third in succession, left the Wild with a 5-14-5 record since Dec. 13 and prompted this postgame analysis from Yeo: "We flat-out stink the last two months."

Defenseman Nick Schultz, the longest-tenured Wild player with 735 career games, frowned Friday and said, "That's fair." "