SAN JOSE Womens Connor Hellebuyck Jersey , Calif. (AP) The Minnesota Wild played the season finale with more urgency even though it was the San Jose Sharks who had something at stake.Jason Zucker scored twice in the second period, Eric Staal matched the franchise record for goals in a season and the Wild denied San Jose home-ice advantage in the first round of the playoffs with a 6-3 victory over the Sharks on Saturday night.While the Wild were locked into the third seed in the Central Division, the Sharks needed one point to finish second in the Pacific and open the playoffs at home. Instead, San Jose lost for the fifth time in the final six games and will be forced to hit the road to start the playoffs against Anaheim in the first meeting between the rivals since the Ducks upset the Presidents’ Trophy-winning Sharks in 2009.”It was disappointing tonight, but one game doesn’t define our season,” coach Peter DeBoer said. ”I think if someone told me a month ago that we’d have 100 points, I would have taken that, regardless if we had home-ice or who we were playing or not.”Mikael Granlund scored the tiebreaking goal 28 seconds before Zucker got his first and Jonas Brodin and Matt Cullen also scored for the Wild. Staal added an empty-net goal to tie Marian Gaborik’s franchise record for goals in a season with 42.”I wasn’t going to miss that one,” Staal said. ”It’s cool, it’s fun to have that alongside Marian, he’s a great player and a great goal scorer, so it was fun.”Devan Dubnyk made 27 saves. Minnesota finished the season with 101 points, going over the 100-point mark for the second straight season and fourth time in franchise history.”I thought our team played really hard Dmitry Kulikov Jersey ,” coach Bruce Boudreau said. ”I don’t know if (San Jose) took the night off, or not, I’m hoping to believe that we played well enough that we didn’t give them an opportunity.”Brent Burns, Joe Pavelski and Timo Meier scored for San Jose. Martin Jones allowed five goals on 19 shots before being replaced by Aaron Dell to start the third period.The Sharks started strong in the second period and held Minnesota without a shot for more than eight minutes. But the Wild then struck twice within less than a minute midway through the period to take control.Granlund started it with a wrist shot for his 21st goal before Zucker took over with two goals of his own, giving him 33 on the season and the Wild coasted from there to the victory.”We didn’t play too well,” Sharks forward Logan Couture said. ”We should have played better. Disappointing. I think over 82 games in the season we had a pretty solid year to make the playoffs.”The Wild started fast, holding San Jose to no shots on goal for nearly nine minutes and taking a 2-0 lead on goals from Brodin and Cullen.The Sharks then found their game late in the period and scored twice in 64 seconds to tie it, with Burns getting the first on a shot from the point and Pavelski tying the game after a turnover by Matt Dumba.NOTES: Wild D Louie Belpedio made his NHL debut after signing a contract earlier this week following a four-year career at Miami of Ohio. He had two assists to become the first Minnesota player ever with two points in his debut. … Sharks F Evander Kane returned to the lineup after missing two games with an undisclosed injury. … Brodin’s goal gave him 100 career points.UP NEXTWild: First round of playoffs vs. Winnipeg.Sharks: First round of playoffs vs. Anaheim.— Drew Doughty watched other playoff games this season and couldn’t believe that George Parros, the NHL’s discipline czar, had suspended him for a head shot.”I saw four hits last night that deserved more than that,” the Los Angeles Kings defenseman said.Doughty’s one-game suspension was the first of several in the first round for a hit to the head of an opponent. Toronto’s Nazem Kadri got three games and Winnipeg’s Josh Morrissey and Nashville’s Ryan Hartman got one game each. Washington’s Tom Wilson and Tampa Bay’s Nikita Kucherov were among those who got off without significant punishment.The criticism, from Columbus to Colorado and from New Jersey to Los Angeles, was loud enough that the NHL’s department of player safety put out a video last week explaining its reasoning for suspending Doughty and Hartman but not Kucherov or Predators center Ryan Johansen.”The illegal check to the head rule is often misunderstood or misstated Youth Dustin Byfuglien Jersey ,” the league said in the video. ”Illegal checks to the head and legal full body hits often look similar at first glance because the difference between legal and illegal can be a matter of inches in a sport that moves fast.”Discontent over the goalie interference rule has been grabbing headlines for weeks, but the head shot discussion carries far more serious implications for a league still grappling with how best to protect its players. What’s acceptable has evolved from the early days of hockey through Scott Stevens’ then-legal crushing blow on Eric Lindros in 2000 to today, where checks to the head are parsed frame-by-frame to determine if a line was crossed. The NHL, too, is still facing a federal class-action concussion lawsuit filed by former players alleging it failed to warn them about the health risks associated with head injuries.Meeting with Associated Press Sports Editors last week, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman insisted there was nothing new about the subject. Asked about player safety, Bettman said Parros is off to good start in the former enforcer’s first season as vice president of player safety. He said he is proud of player safety’s transparency in the form of videos detailing the reasons for suspending a player.”Sometimes we get accused of splitting hairs, but that’s exactly what they have to do,” Bettman said. ”I think he’s reached the appropriate conclusion when it’s been a hockey play that doesn’t transcend the rules and I think he’s been appropriately punitive in cases where it warranted it. There’s never going to be a shortage of critics of what they do.”Doughty, a finalist for the Norris Trophy as the league’s top defenseman, said he hit Vegas forward William Carrier’s shoulder first before his head in Game 1. Kings coach John Stevens added: ”As long as I’m on the earth, I’m going to agree to disagree with that decision.”The league video emphasized that an illegal check to the head concerns a player’s head being the main point of contact, not the first point of contact. Based on experience http://www.jetsshoppro.com/authentic-ja … uba-jersey , the league said, a player’s head snapping back on these kinds of hits indicates significant head contact.Los Angeles general manager Rob Blake, who worked under Brendan Shanahan in the department of player safety from 2010-2013, said it’s a tough job while at the same time reiterating the organization was unhappy with the suspension of Doughty. Columbus GM Jarmo Kekalainen was upset forward Josh Anderson was ejected from Game 1 against Washington for boarding Michal Kempny and called a hit to the head of Alexander Wennberg from Washington’s Tom Wilson that got only a minor penalty ”dangerous.”Wilson was not given a hearing or suspended. Wennberg missed Games 2, 3 and 4 and the hit was not included in the NHL’s explanation video.Columbus coach John Tortorella didn’t want to weigh in on the lack of punishment for Wilson, a common refrain across the NHL because nothing can be done after the fact. For a more specific reason, Bettman doesn’t weigh in on suspensions because any appeals go to him. He does look at suspension videos before they are issued.”I watch as a fan to make sure they make sense,” Bettman said. ”I want to make sure the videos we send out are clear.””I think player safety as a whole has done an extraordinarily good job of changing the culture,” Bettman said.” We have players not making certain types of hits anymore. We have players who are more accountable for their conduct and understand it and I believe that they’ve been consistent.”—AP Sports Writer Teresa M. Walker in Nashville, Tennessee, and Sports Deputy Editor for Newsgathering Howie Rumberg in New York contributed.