RALEIGH, N.C. — Matt Dumba adores Joel Eriksson Ek, but man, did the Wild defenseman want to plunk the center across the melon during an afternoon practice at Tampa’s Amalie Arena on Wednesday and then use that, as one person quipped, “goofy, dopey,” almost expressionless face like a punching bag the way Eriksson Ek’s opponents do on a nightly basis.

“You just want to slash him across the head,” Dumba said, shaking his head. “He just plays hard. He’s strong. He’s physically imposing, and that just annoys the heck out of you. This guy’s just always over you, I feel. In practice sometimes, it’s like, ‘Come on, just leave me alone already.’”

On Wednesday, just 15 hours after Eriksson Ek suffocated a couple Florida Panthers into losing their absolute minds, all Dumba and the rest of the Wild’s two power-play units wanted to do was zip the puck around the offensive zone and feel good about themselves.

They wanted to simply breeze through practice, gear down and get out of the rink so they could enjoy Florida’s sunny, refreshing weather.

Was that too much to ask?

It was for Eriksson Ek, who wasn’t having it.

After all, practice wasn’t just a time to gain confidence on the power play.

It was a time to fine-tune the penalty kill, too, so the 22-year-old buzzed around the defensive zone like a gnat and disrupted passes, got in shooting lanes, poked pucks out of the end zone with a jutting stick and smothered the exasperated power-play pointmen.

“It’s a strength to piss off your opponent, and nobody pisses off opponents like Ekker,” teammate and usual linemate Luke Kunin said. “It’s just how hard he plays. He’s just a pest out there. That’s why you love playing with him out there. He gets under the opponent’s skin and is always doing the right things, and it’s almost funny to watch because guys hate him.”

Nobody on the Wild draws the ire of opponents quite like Eriksson Ek.

“To be honest with you, I’ve got no clue why,” Eriksson Ek said. “I just try to go into hard areas and try to battle for the puck. If I don’t have the puck, I want to get it back as soon as possible. Be tight to guys, don’t give them a lot of space and try to be a pain to play against.”

Eriksson Ek plays a subtly heavy game, and, “he outworks everybody,” coach Bruce Boudreau said. “People don’t realize that he’s 215 pounds, and he’s in tremendous shape. And as much respect as Ekker has for his opponents, he doesn’t respect them on the ice. In other words, he’ll hit a third- or fourth-liner just as hard as he’ll hit Patrick Kane or Aleksander Barkov or Tyler Seguin or Taylor Hall.

“So that automatically gets under everybody’s skin.”

What’s so funny is the quiet, unassuming player always looks and seems so, so innocent.

Yet there’s got to be something he’s doing on the ice because every single game, it’s just a matter of time before some opposing player — or five opposing players — will turn around and just snap.

Joel Eriksson Ek
(Mark LoMoglio / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
What could it possibly be?

“It’s that face,” Zach Parise said before roaring with the type of laughter that triggered his side of the Tampa Bay visitors’ locker room to break down laughing as well. “It’s just that look on his face. I think it drives players crazy. He just looks at you with that face, you know, kind of like a blank stare and a slight grin.

“He’s just got that look, like after he knocks the puck away from you, he kind of gives you that look, and opponents are like, ‘I don’t know whether to be pissed off at you or not,’ you know what I mean? It’s great, it’s awesome.”

Alex Stalock’s gotten several up-close-and-personal views of Eriksson Ek’s persistent goalmouth scrums.

The goalie thinks he knows why opponents despise Eriksson Ek.

“It’s the fact that they get no reaction,” Stalock said. “He is that annoying little guy. Like I see stuff where the scrum’s done and he gives that last whack quick. Like the guy’s skating away, and he’ll just slap the guy’s stick or jab him in the back, you know, little stuff like that.

“He’s like the annoying younger brother that always gets the last lick in on the older brother, and then it’s the older brother who gets in trouble. It’s almost like that where the scrum happens, and then he’ll do something really minor, and the guy looks back over his shoulder and is like, ‘Him again?’ And then they get in Ekker’s face and he just doesn’t do shit. They just get no reaction. He just kind of stares at them, which pisses them off even more.”

“I think the biggest thing, too,” teammate Marcus Foligno added, “is I don’t think he knows how to chirp. He hits the guy and he doesn’t really say much after. The guy wants to get into a verbal feud match, and it doesn’t really work out that way because Ekker doesn’t say a thing from the get-go.

“That just frustrates a lot of guys because they want to see him get really, really angry, but he really doesn’t. You saw it against (Jack) Eichel (last month) in Buffalo. Ekker handled him in the corner and then Eichel gets frustrated and just jumps him. It’s amazing. Ekker just stays on his feet, is always getting punched at, yet he takes it and he goes with it and even gives you the slightest smile as you’re punching him. And that just frustrates these guys even more.”

Plus, after Eriksson Ek chipped a couple bottom front teeth last week courtesy of a high-stick on the last homestand, “He looks like Lloyd Christmas,” said Foligno, comparing Eriksson Ek to the “Dumb and Dumber” character, “so now it’s even worse when he smiles at you.”

Lloyd Christmas and Joel Erikkson Ek
Lloyd Christmas and doppelgänger Joel Erikkson Ek (“Dumb and Dumber” and Michael Russo)
It’s not just opponents. Eriksson Ek also takes a lot of grief amongst his teammates.

Boudreau just drools over the player, especially the fact that Eriksson Ek traditionally comes into training camp in the best shape of any Wild player.

“It seems like every year Ekker’s been at camp, Bruce just looooooooooves his testing numbers,” Stalock, a former University of Minnesota-Duluth standout, said exaggeratedly. “That’s all we hear about. You know how in college there’s always that one guy that runs away with the testing? That’s Ekker. He’s unbelievable. He beats everybody in that Airdyne (bicycle) test by like 30 seconds. And he does great with all the tests.

“Bruce is always like, ‘Ekker, Ekker, Ekker, Ekker, Ekker,’ because he crushes all the testing, the skate tests, his body fat is nothing and all that stuff.”

“He just kills training camp, he kills all the workouts,” linemate Jordan Greenway said, grinning.

So Wild teammates came up with the perfect nickname: “Mr. September.”

“Every year he comes in and dominates all the tests. Dominates the preseason,” Parise said, laughing. “So, the nickname came easy. Mr. September.”

Before the season, Stalock, Parise and a few other Wild players were down at Target Field for “Wild Night” and they saw how different Twins players had personalized T-shirts. The local Minnesota company, SotaStick, designed those shirts, so a light bulb illuminated over the heads of Stalock and Parise.

“It was a group effort. I don’t want to take all the credit for it,” Parise said, chuckling.

“Oh, you don’t want to take all the credit?” eavesdropping teammate Jason Zucker cracked.

“Well, I’ll take a lot of it,” Parise said.

They’d make Mr. September shirts.

Stalock was big on the design part.

He sent different pictures of Eriksson Ek to SotaStick and its team came up with a hilarious design of a blank-faced Eriksson Ek sitting on one of those bikes he sprinted two miles on in less than four minutes during this September’s training camp.

The caption is all caps: MR. SEPTEMBER.



Stalock and Parise then had T-shirts made for every single Wild player and locker-room staffer.

“I went back and forth with the guys there sending images and that’s what they came up with,” Stalock said, proudly. “We brought them down to the rink one day, passed them around to everybody, everybody put them on.

“Ekker walks into the room and had no clue. It was so great.”

Eriksson Ek smiles when asked about the T-shirts.

“It’s funny,” he said.

Boudreau understands the T-shirts are a bit of a shot, particularly at him because he gushes so much about Eriksson Ek.

But the coach is unapologetic, saying bluntly, “He’s in so much better shape than everybody.”

“A lot of guys think those tests are BS, that it’s what you do on the ice that matters, but the strength coaches love ‘em and so does Bruce,” Foligno said. “So, Ekker’s Mr. September because he’s the best in September.

“Simple.”

This season, after a slow start to his career, Eriksson Ek has really come in to his own and been at his best in September, October, November and now December.

“It’s hard when you’re coming over from Sweden,” he said. “It’s so different. And how many games there? Eighty-two here to probably 50 in the regular season there, plus all the travel and your life outside hockey, too. I had to get comfortable with speaking, too. I feel I’ve come a long way.

“I found my role right now and try to play my best every night and help the team to win games.”

Eriksson Ek has developed into the Wild’s shutdown center on their third line usually between Greenway and Kunin. Thursday in a win over the Lightning, Eriksson Ek scored his second goal of the season and 11th point in 26 games. He’s a mainstay on the penalty kill, but it’s driving opposing top lines bonkers on a nightly basis that’s his specialty.

“I don’t think guys realize how big he is, too, and how strong he is,” Foligno said. “I think that’s the thing, guys go to hit him and they almost get rocked sometimes. They get stood up and they get pissed off about that sometimes. That’s why you see against Dallas, Jamie Benn goes after him all night.

“Jamie Benn’s just frustrated with Ekker; always getting shots or cross-checks in the back. I think that’s a player that you want on your team because in the playoffs, that’s where it matters. And like I said, Benn’s infuriated, and then Ek doesn’t say anything back. I would be mad, too. I would hate to get in a confrontation and the guy just stares at you, kind of just smiles a little bit, and that’s what he does.”



Parise said it’s uncanny the way Eriksson Ek just pastes himself to opponents.

“He’s really good positionally. He’s annoying to play against,” Parise said. “He’s strong. So, you think you’ve got him beat, or you think you can outmuscle him in the corner, and then you just bounce off him or he puts you against the boards or separates you from the puck.

“I’ve even noticed this against him in practice. He’s tough. He’s tough to knock off the puck, he’s tough to fend off, and he’s pretty relentless on that puck. I can’t imagine playing against a guy like him all night. It can get frustrating.”

Especially when most opponents have no clue who he is.

When you’re a top player going against the Wild, you know you’re going to have to go to war that night with a guy like Mikko Koivu.

But Eriksson Ek? Nobody knows who the heck he is.

Eriksson Ek may always be considered a miss by some in the draft because the Wild took him at 20th overall in 2015 over hometown kid Brock Boeser, who has scored 52 more goals than Eriksson’s Ek’s 18 and 94 more points than Eriksson Ek’s 48 in five fewer games than Eriksson Ek’s 174.

But Eriksson Ek should be able to play a long time the way he plays.

He’ll probably never score like Koivu, the Wild’s all-time leading scorer, but he’s certainly going to be as tenacious as Koivu and check as tightly as him.

“I get to skate with him on a line every game, so I see how hard a game he plays,” Greenway said. “He always forechecks hard, he’s bumping into guys, he plays physical, and he’s very fast. There’s a lot that you can get frustrated at when it comes to his game, and he plays an honest game.

“He’s not dirty. He doesn’t cheat. He just plays a 200-foot game, so you get frustrated when you always have a guy in your face doing the right things. It’s annoying.”

It’s taken Eriksson Ek awhile to find his role on the team. He may be young, but this is Year 4 for him on the Wild.

“But let’s also understand that he’s always had, since I’ve been here, Koivu and (Eric) Staal in front of him,” Boudreau said. “Matt Cullen. Charlie Coyle. Erik Haula. Even Martin Hanzal.

“He hasn’t had the opportunity quite frankly. But starting two years ago, Cully was scheduled to be the third-line center, but I would start to use Ek in that spot and Matt would be more the fourth.

“That continued into last year where he became the third-line center and now he’s a bona fide, what I’d call third-line center who can check. And he makes some pretty good plays.”

If he could only score on a more consistent basis.

“And who knows if that’ll ever happen,” Boudreau said. “I still would think that every coach would love to have a guy like Ekker on his team. I rave about him a lot because there is a lot to rave about.

“He is a really decent player and one that you can rely on, and I love watching him play because I think he’s just a hockey player. You’re not going to say offensive or defensive.

“He’s just a hockey player.”