The rumor isn't true, and you should know that before you get mad at me.
No recap of Thursday's season opener in Nashville, from the wire copy to the beat writers in St. Paul, mentions Jesper Wallstedt attempting a shot at an empty net. Minnesota won 3-1 on goals from Nick Foligno, Blake Coleman and Kirill Kaprizov, and Wallstedt made 19 saves behind them. That's the game. If Wally had even leaned into a shot attempt with the net empty, somebody covering that building would have had it online before the final horn. Nobody did. The "he almost had one" version of this night is fan fiction, built the way all the best hockey folklore gets built: somebody half-remembers a moment, says it out loud in a group chat, and by Saturday it's gospel.
I get why you want it to be true, though, and I don't think you're wrong to want it.
Start with the nickname. His own captain calls him Wally, and Jared Spurgeon talks about his "stoic look" and the confidence he carries after a playoff run. That's the description of a goalie who'd stay calm if the net ever opened up in front of him. Now go back four years, to an Iowa Wild game in the AHL. Wallstedt scored, an actual empty-net goal, the kind that ends up on a highlight reel, in a game Iowa won 5-2. It's on his record.
He doesn't have to look far to see how the other half of this plays out at the NHL level either, because his own goaltending partner already did it. Filip Gustavsson caught a shot, dropped it, and fired it the length of the ice into an empty net against St. Louis two years ago, the first goalie goal in Wild history. Gustavsson is out right now, which is the only reason Wallstedt was even in the net Thursday night. Wallstedt sits one stall over from the goalie who's already done the thing the internet swears he almost did, and he's got a goal of his own on the record from the level just below this one.
The skeptics have a point. A shot that didn't happen is just a rumor. Hope doesn't show up in the box score. But that's exactly why this is worth writing about instead of ignoring. A story this plausible doesn't get invented about just any goalie. It gets invented about Wallstedt because the pieces are already there: the composure, the history, and a teammate who's already proven it can be done in this very sweater.
The rumor jumped the gun by one game, nothing more. Wally is going to get his shot, and when the net is finally empty for real, I don't want to hear a single person act surprised.
