Corrects to Jan. 8 not 7 - Minnesota Wild goalie Niklas Backstrom, left, of Finland, gives up a power-play goal to Chicago Blackhawks' Patrick Kane, right, in the first period of an NHL hockey game, Thursday, Jan. 8, 2015, in St. Paul, Minn. (AP Photo/Jim Mone)

(Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.)

The Wild are bad. Look at the standings.

Dead last in Conference III, seven points out of a playoff spot, and with fewer points overall than the Ottawa Senators. They're a team that's been sliding all season, and now in perhaps their worst funk of all. They entered last night's road tilt at Chicago just two wins in their last 12 games — a type of run so bad it prompts teams with as little near-term hope as the Oilers to start thinking about canning a coach — and with their next game against the Penguins, well, things could get even uglier.

This is, on paper, a far cry from a team that lucked into advancing to the second round last season (which is to say they had the good fortune to draw a terrible Avalanche team in the first) and also made the playoffs the year before that. It seems to be a team going backwards.

But a closer look says things aren't really as they appear on the surface. Sure, the won-lost record is indefensible, as is the fact that the team has gone on three different losing runs of four games or more this year. These days, they seem like they're never going to win, and have conceded 62 goals in 17 games since the start of December, while only scoring 44.

Now, scoring 2.59 a night is solidly middle of the pack in terms of goals per game in the league this season, but 3.65 conceded means they're losing by an average of more than a goal a night, and that number places them among the worst in the league over that time (with special thanks, I'm sure, to Toronto, Arizona, and Buffalo for keeping them out of the basement). But here's the thing, apart from goals scored and conceded, even over this dismal stretch they've actually tended to be the better team most nights out.

Even when wiping away score effects and all other reasons for strong underlying numbers, the Wild are above water in terms of their possession numbers over this 12-game stretch and, indeed, for the entire season. And you say, “So what,” because obviously they're not winning the games, but when it comes to the process, the Wild are, in fact, better than most teams, sitting at a score-adjusted 52.9 percent fenwick. That's good for ninth in the NHL.

And admittedly, they've been sliding for some time now in this regard after a hot start that had many wondering just how good the club could be. But the Wild seem to slide in possession over the course of the season every single year — whether due to injuries, overwork of the team's top players, or other factors that need to be examined more closely — and this year is no different.

But nonetheless, this is the first time since the Parise and Suter contracts were signed that the Wild look like they could finish the year as a positive possession team (though the odds are dropping by the day), meaning that the club is trending in the right direction even with its myriad problems. They're also producing more shots and goals per 60 minutes at even strength than they have in the last two seasons. This is also true across all strength situations, and the numbers are comparable to the relative power play success in terms of underlying numbers they had in the lockout-shortened 2013 season. Maybe you'd like to see them improve in the goal-scoring department. They're at just 14.5 percent, down from the mid-17 percent range seen each of the last two years, but it's largely because they're neither drawing a lot of penalties, nor converting on the ones they do get, away from home. These are problems that need to be solved, but teams go on inscrutable runs of success and failure on power plays all the time. They'll be hot for five games, ice cold for three, and so on. This club doesn't strike me as having a solidly great or poor power play set-up, but they are a little better than this.

However, what's killing them — and you knew this already — is goaltending.

The team has dropped from third in the league in even-strength save percentage in 2013-14 (.932) to dead last this time around (.900). Yes, they are actually worse than the Oilers. And as outlined above, it might end up costing Mike Yeo his job.