Mikael Granlund 2015 Playoff Heroics

Lore & Background

When the Minnesota Wild selected Mikael Granlund with the 9th pick in the 2010 NHL Draft, the organization was making a statement: they were building something. The young Finn, already a star in the Liiga, did not join the Wild until the 2012-13 season, taking time to develop before making his NHL debut. For his first few seasons, the Wild were a team grinding through the middle of the standings, and Granlund grew alongside them—learning the NHL's physicality, developing his two-way game, and slowly becoming the player the draft night hype promised.

By the 2014-15 season, the Wild had clicked. They finished with enough points to sneak into the playoffs for the fifth time in franchise history, and the NHL's playoff bracket paired them with the St. Louis Blues, the team that had dominated the Central Division all year. The narrative was clear: the hungry Wild against the experienced, loaded Blues. Seven games later, the narrative was reversed. The series was a slugfest of tight scores, overtime heartbreaks, and defensive battles that wore both teams to the bone. Granlund, playing through the physicality and the pressure, emerged as the Wild's most dangerous offensive threat and their emotional anchor.

The rivalry with St. Louis, which had simmered through the regular season and boiled over in a 2014 playoff meeting, intensified in those seven games. For a fanbase in a market that had experienced playoff series before, the back-and-forth drama of the 2015 first round became sacred. Granlund's name became synonymous with the Wild's identity in a way that transcended statistics. He was the kid from Oulu who refused to lose, and in that refusal, he gave a franchise another taste of what it meant to be a playoff team.

Reader's Guide

The stakes: the Wild's first-ever playoff series, against the division's top seed, with the entire franchise's future hanging on seven games of hockey.

The series opened with the kind of tight, physical hockey that both teams thrived on. Goals were hard to come by, goaltending was elite on both sides, and every shift felt like a small war. The Wild, playing with the desperation of a team that had never been here before, matched the Blues' experience with sheer grit. Granlund was everywhere—winning faceoffs, driving the net, and creating the chances that kept Minnesota alive when the Blues' talent should have been too much.

By Game 7, both teams were running on fumes. The Scottrade Center was deafening, the Blues fans believing the series was theirs to close. But the Wild had a different story to tell. In the decisive sequence, Granlund found space in the slot, collected the puck under pressure, and released a shot that buried the Blues' goaltender. The net rippled. The Wild bench emptied the bench. The building, seconds before a wall of blue noise, fell into a stunned, disbelieving silence.

Wild fans still reference that series years later—not because of a single stat line, but because it was the moment the franchise stopped being a project and became a team. Big M didn't just win a game; he gave a market its first playoff memory, and that memory never faded.

Did You Know?

• The Minnesota Wild had made the playoffs in 2003, 2007, 2008, and 2013 before the 2014-15 season.
• The highest-drafted player in Wild franchise history is Marian Gaborik, selected 3rd overall in 2000.
• The Wild and Blues had previously met in the playoffs in 2014, making the 2015 series their second postseason meeting.