Mikael Granlund 2015 Playoff Heroics

Lore & Background

When the Minnesota Wild selected Mikael Granlund with the first pick in the 2011 NHL Draft, the organization was making a statement: they were building something. The young Finn, already a star in the Liiga, was handed the keys to the center ice role almost immediately. For his first few seasons, the Wild were a rebuilding 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 first 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 young, 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, boiled over in those seven games. For a fanbase in a market that had never experienced a playoff series, 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 its first taste of what it meant to be a playoff team.

In Their Own Story

The Scottrade Center was a pressure cooker. The air smelled of cold breath and hot popcorn, and the crowd—thousands of Blues fans who had seen their team dominate the division all year—roared with the confidence of people who believed seven games was a formality. On the Wild side of the ice, Granlund skated with that particular stillness he had, eyes locked forward, stick low, reading the play three seconds before it happened. The series had bled both teams dry. Bodies were heavy. Minds were frayed. But in the moments that mattered, when the puck dropped in the neutral zone and the play broke open, there was always that same quiet Finnish center, skating into space, waiting for the pass, waiting for the moment. And when it came, he did not hesitate. The net exploded. The building, which had been a wall of blue noise, went silent for one long, impossible second. Then the Wild bench erupted. Granlund pointed to the sky, skated back to his own zone, and said nothing. He didn't need to. The franchise had its hero, and the story was written in ice and adrenaline and the particular silence of a crowd that had just lost.

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 2014-15 season was the Minnesota Wild's first-ever appearance in the NHL playoffs after 14 seasons in the league.
• Mikael Granlund was selected with the 1st overall pick in the 2011 NHL Draft, making him the highest-drafted player in Wild franchise history.
• Granlund is a native of Oulu, Finland, and became the first Finnish-born player to serve as the primary face of a Minnesota Wild playoff push.
• The Wild-Blues series in 2015 was the first playoff meeting between the two Central Division rivals, igniting a rivalry that would define the division for years to come.