What will the Wild do without Matt Dumba?

It wasn’t so long ago that the Minnesota Wild were looking very comfortable.

Through mid-November they were 12-5-2, shooting the lights out and getting solid goaltending. They had the fourth-best points percentage in the league, alongside teams everyone figured would be great this season: Nashville, Tampa, Toronto, Winnipeg, Columbus, and Boston.

The problem when you’re in that kind of group unexpectedly is that it raises expectations, so the fact that the Wild were doing all that with shaky-at-best underlying numbers while most of those other teams were in better shape process-wise should have been a point of concern.

Things took a turn from there; since Nov. 17, the Wild are just 5-10-1 and while they’ve straightened out their process with much better underlying numbers, their shooting luck has completely evaporated.

They went from 10.6 percent as a team to just 7.8 percent. Maybe you say that’s just regression (it is) and maybe you say the Wild don’t exactly have the horses to score a ton of goals in the first place (they don’t) but the most compelling argument in all this is that the answer is right in the middle. They’re neither 12-5-2 good nor 5-10-1 bad, but on aggregate that puts them right in the thick of the playoff bubble.

They entered the Christmas break two points back of Edmonton with one fewer game played and six points behind Anaheim with three in hand, which is to say that while they have some teams to leapfrog, they’re certainly not out of it. Not even close.

But the problem is that the Wild have been one of the least-injured teams in the league this year, only having recently surpassed Toronto as being the team with the fewest man-games lost to injury. But now Matt Dumba is hurt — has been since Dec. 15 — and it appears as though he’ll be on the shelf for three whole months. That puts you in late March, right around the time everyone hits the 72-game threshold.

And the problem is that Dumba has arguably been their best defenseman this year. We’re talking solid underlying numbers to go with his 12 goals (most by any defender in the league this season), and while he’s not eating Ryan Suter minutes and Jared Spurgeon is also getting a higher-volume run-out, Dumba being a Torey Krug-type offense-driving defenseman provides the Wild with a lot of value.

Simply put, he and Ryan Suter are basically the only defensemen on the roster who play what you’d call “fun” hockey, with lots of shot attempts at both ends of the ice. And because Dumba generates more than he gives up (unlike Suter), it doesn’t matter that it’s higher-volume at both ends. With this injury, that value is suddenly gone.

And this is a team that could ill afford to lose offense in the first place. He’s got 12 goals in 30-plus games and he’s tied with Eric Staal for second on the team. Only two other guys are in double digits. It’s almost 2019. Overall, Minnesota is 16th in goals per 60, and that’s with Dumba aboard for like 90 percent of their games played.

What’s interesting is that they’re one of the better expected-goals teams in the league this season, but again I think it’s reasonable to say they don’t have the roster talent to necessarily even keep up with that. They play at a slow pace offensively but are good at SOG suppression (both quantity and quality) to make up for it, so Devan Dubnyk should be able to keep up his better-than-average performance on the whole.

That’s even without Dumba, who’s not the best xG-prevention guy out there but makes up for it by generating a ton of offense himself. In theory, the Wild’s replacement for him could try to slow things down like the rest of the team has, but when you already can’t score much, that’s a dicey proposition.

Point is the Wild have, for the most part, been doing a lot of winning or losing in 3-2 games. They might have to start playing more 2-1 games if they want to stay in the hunt. Not easy in a higher-scoring league, is it?

But there is some good news here: The rest of the West’s playoff bubble teams aren’t exactly good. Anaheim (minus-14), Edmonton (minus-9), Dallas (minus-3), and Vancouver (minus-8) are ahead of Minnesota in the standings that weren’t in divisional playoff spots coming out of the break. Minnesota is currently seventh in the West in goal difference at plus-4.

Obviously Anaheim has MVP-worthy goaltending from John Gibson and Edmonton has Connor McDavid, but if the Wild can just keep everyone healthy they can keep themselves in it.

But this Dumba injury won’t make it easy. And given the team’s known deficiencies, it already wasn’t.

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Ryan Lambert is a Yahoo! Sports hockey columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

All stats via Corsica unless otherwise noted.