His teammates milled quietly around him, tossing sweaty hockey gear in laundry bins as they prepared to leave Vancouver's Rogers Arena, but Zach Parise wasn't ready to move beyond the Wild's 2-1 loss Tuesday, Feb. 12. Not just yet.

The forward seethed as he stared blankly ahead, as if some answer to the Wild's offensive struggles were hiding in the ether, just waiting to be smoked out.

When the Wild paid Parise $98 million over the summer, one of the things they figured they'd bought was an antidote to the scoring problems that made them the league's worst offensive team last season, and Parise delivered that early in this lockout-shortened season.

But Parise had just gone without a goal for the seventh time in eight games, and the Wild had scored just one goal in regulation for the sixth straight contest. If lingering a few minutes longer could produce some kind of revelation, the bus back to the team hotel would just have to wait.

"I don't have an explanation, and I don't know why," Parise said flatly. "Home and road, we're having a hard time scoring."

The answer seemed at once simple and unattainable. The Wild fired 26 shots at Vancouver goaltender Roberto Luongo, controlling play for long stretches of the third period as they searched for the tying goal. Ryan Suter rang a shot off the crossbar with 14:28 left, after Luongo stopped Parise's best chance of the night.

"We stuck with it, and we got the chances we needed to get," coach Mike Yeo said. "We did everything except finish."

The Wild's first order of business might be to tune up their power play. They scored a power-play goal Tuesday night but went 1 for 5 with the man advantage -- and are 3 for 26 on power plays in their past eight games.

Yeo has juggled several players on the point opposite Suter on their first power-play unit, trying to find the right counterpart for their new defenseman. Jared Spurgeon played with Suter on Tuesday, and Tom Gilbert, Pierre-Marc Bouchard and Matt Cullen all have seen time there.

In a 2-1 shootout victory Monday in Calgary, Minnesota had 10 shots on four power-play attempts, none of which found the net.

"For players like (Parise), that's where offense comes from a lot," Yeo said. "We're getting chances. It's not like we're getting out-chanced in these games. It's not like the other team is getting 20 scoring chances and we're getting eight. We're at least even with these teams. We have to capitalize on it."

The track records of players like Parise, Suter and Mikko Koivu suggest they will start putting pucks away. Koivu is shooting just 5.6 percent, well below his career rate of 8.9 percent. And Suter, who has averaged a goal every 14 games in his career, hasn't scored through 13 games.

The solution could be as simple as a lucky bounce that gets the Wild going, or a goalie offering one too many favorable shooting lanes. But there's no telling when, or if, those things will come, and that's the scary thing for a team that didn't expect to have this much trouble scoring.

"We've got to find a way to score," Parise said. "That's too many games of just getting one when we're generating offense. It's not good enough right now."

Follow Ben Goessling at twitter.com/BenGoesslingPP.