Fight night at the Delta Center turns into a hockey game

A significant chunk of NHL talk radio air time this season has been dedicated to heated returns of former players.

Brady Tkachuk got booed to no end when he returned to Ottawa last week. Quinn Hughes met a hostile crowd in his first visit back in Vancouver on Sunday. Connor Hellebuyck is in for the same when he plays in Winnipeg in November.

Who would have guessed, though, that Olli Määttä’s return to Utah would be just as spirited?

Määttä, of course, wasn’t the source of the booing that chorused through the Delta Center Tuesday evening — he was reasonably liked during his two partial seasons with the Hockey Club and Mammoth, and a number of fans showed up to the game in his jersey.

Rather, it was heated because of what seems to be a budding divisional rivalry.

The game saw three fights and featured 52 penalty minutes between the two teams. Unfortunately for the Mammoth, 29 of those minutes were assessed to them, putting them on the penalty kill seven times compared to their four power play opportunities.

The result was a 3-1 Wild win.

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“It’s sometimes good, I guess, in a way, to get your spirit up, get the competitiveness kind of going,” said captain Clayton Keller after the game.

Keller was responsible for six of those penalty minutes, including an extra penalty for “abuse of officials” after a debatable tripping call. That extra penalty resulted in Minnesota’s eventual game-winning goal.

“I’ve got to lay off the refs,” Keller admitted. “But I don’t know, it’s a game and you care about it and it’s high-emotion. I think, you know, we’ll learn from it.”

Head coach André Tourigny defended his captain in his postgame interview.

“Surely, I want him to control his emotion and I don’t want that penalty. But if you look at all the circumstances (that) lead to that, I think we were all frustrated,” Tourigny said in reference to the original call and the many others that preceded it. “I was standing up on the bench. There was a level of frustration.”

The Minnesota Wild and the Utah Mammoth sit first and second, respectively, in the Central Division standings. They’ll see each other three more times this season, and it’s entirely possible that they could meet again in the playoffs.

That excites the Mammoth.

“If you look at the standings, we’re right there, neck and neck in our division,” said Logan Cooley. “Tough team to play against (and they’re) always in the playoffs. For us, I mean, I think it’s a good measuring stick to kind of compare against them.

“… Any time we play them, we’re definitely up for it.”

The home crowd was certainly into it. Those may have been the loudest “ref, you suck” chants the Delta Center has ever seen for an NHL game.

Wild head coach John Hynes voiced admiration for this Mammoth team.

“A lot of respect for Utah,” he said. “Both teams are really close together in the standings. Like I said before the game, it was a culture game. You’ve got to dig in, you’ve got to be ready to compete the way we can compete and finish this the right way.”

The Mammoth now head out on a six-game road trip, which begins in Pittsburgh on Thursday. Their next meeting with the Wild comes on Nov. 25 in St. Paul.

Rodney Dangerfield’s old line gets quoted a lot in hockey circles, and it certainly applies here.

“I went to a fight the other night, and a hockey game broke out.”