Jesper Wallstedt couldn’t sleep after making his NHL debut on Wednesday in Dallas. Instead, he watched the game he had just played, a 7-2 loss to the Stars at American Airlines Center.

“I’ve probably watched the game three or four times now,” he said.

The Wild’s top prospect, Wallstedt, 21, stopped 27 of 34 shots in a game that tilted the Stars’ way from the opening faceoff. Minnesota trailed 3-0 after two periods, then gave up four third-period goals in a game Wallstedt would probably like to forget.

But he won’t let himself.

“Of course it was a good learning experience, a lot of things to take away from it,” Wallstedt said Friday before he backed up Marc-Andre Fleury against the Philadelphia Flyers at Xcel Energy Center. “I think I’ve kind of realized a lot of things I have to improve on, that have to be better if I’m going to play at this level.”

The 20th overall pick in the 2021 entry draft, Wallstedt has spent most of the past two seasons with the Wild’s American Hockey League club in Iowa, where he was 11-9-0 with two shutouts, a 2.54 goals-against average and .931 save percentage in 20 starts this season (he and Nic Petan are AHL all-stars).

Wallstedt remains with the big league club while No. 1 goaltender Filip Gustavsson recovers from a lower-body injury suffered Dec. 30 at Winnipeg. Gustavsson was a participant in Friday’s morning skate and could start the second of back-to-backs on Saturday against Arizona.

Certainly, Wallstedt would like another shot at lowering his NHL GAA of 7.00 and raising his .794 save percentage. He acknowledged Friday he wasn’t entirely ready for what he was going to see from Dallas, a top-division Western Conference club that completed a season sweep in three games against Minnesota.

“The game is faster, the puck moves faster, players do things that aren’t expected — or you don’t really expect things to happen that way,” he said. “You try to read the game and stay ahead of it, but they just lure you into thinking that something’s going to happen, and then make something else happen. They’re really good to cover their shots, to give me misinformation on their release.”

Wallstedt was pulled after giving up six goals Dec. 12 in Milwaukee and sat out the next 10 games with an injury. He played two games in Des Moines, both 4-1 losses to Grand Rapids, before being called up to Minnesota.

“I guess the results haven’t really gone my way this last month or so,” he said. “I’ve been injured and, like I said, it has tested my mentality a little bit. Am I gonna lay down and cry now, or am I gonna fight back and try to improve and get out of this stronger?”

The answer was easy.

“After that, I’ve definitely got more motivation to come back here and put in the work to not go out there in my second chance to not get seven goals-against again,” he said. “So, if the opportunity comes again, I want to perform better than this time, but I think it definitely made me stronger, and maybe tested my mentality a little, too, which was good. I think I needed that.”

Injury updates

Injured forward Kirill Kaprizov, defenseman Jonas Brodin and Gustavsson were all a part of Friday’s morning skate, and all three worked extra to see if they were able to play against the Flyers.

The answer was no, but all appear close to returning. Brodin hasn’t played since Dec. 8 because of an arm injury, and Kaprizov has been out since Dec. 30 with an upper-body injury caused by a couple of hard cross-checks to the back by Winnipeg’s Brenden Dillon.

“Gus, Kirill and Brodin are all in the same boat,” coach John Hynes said after the morning skate. “Heavy workload, doing extra now. We’ll see how they respond to that, and then we’ll see where they’re at.”

New lines

The Wild entered Friday’s game losers in six of their past seven games, and Hynes scrambled his top two lines, putting Matt Boldy and Mats Zuccarello around center Ryan Hartman at the top. The second line was Joel Eriksson Ek centering Marcus Foligno and Marcus Johansson.

Asked if he was looking for an offensive spark, Hynes said, “I’m not looking for a spark. I think the spark offensively will come by us playing the game the right way and playing faster than we did against Dallas.”

That, he added, “is the way we want to play. So, just a couple different looks for guys and combos, some of them have been good, really, in pairs together, so that’s why we made those choices.”

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