The Colorado Avalanche Are Confusing (But Still Great) | Avalanche Review Game 30

The Colorado Avalanche Are Confusing (But Still Great) | Avalanche Review Game 30

The Colorado Avalanche are strange. They are definitively the best five on five team in the NHL and yet they have one of the worst power plays in the NHL. That math doesn’t add up. They have the most wins in the NHL. They lead the NHL and yet when you get into the overtimes they struggle and are genuinely the worst team in the NHL at shootouts. I can’t make any sense of it. ABS lose to the Nashville Predators 4 to3 in the shootout. I don’t think there’s a ton to learn here about the ABS. It’s all of the same problems it has been this entire season for them. Their power play is bad and they’re really bad at shootouts, which again makes no sense. This team is actually pretty decent on the breakaway in real actual hockey. So why do their shootout moves just go away and be horrible? I don’t get it. I’m getting ahead of myself though. This game actually started out great for the ABS. Brent Burns going to kick off the breakout for the ABS. Nothing fancy here, just a crisp pass to his D partner and Manson. And then Manson gets it into the neutral zone and finds Brock Nelson nicely at the blue line. Nelson gets in, does a ridiculously good tow drag to his backhand side, and then from his backhand just beats Soros. The man is nasty. Brock Nelson has turned into an absolutely critical piece for Colorado and his goalcoring rates are fantastic. He’s giving the ABS what they need on that second line and you love to see it. It’s something you can have confidence in going forward. It’s one of the many, many reasons I’m not concerned about the ABS at all, even if they did lose a game to the Nashville Predators. The problem is that hot start goes away quickly. Nashville on the power play here, they set up typical drop pass stuff to get in the zone. Nothing too weird here, but as they get in the zone, this gets chipped up the wall. And something weird is happening here. This is a weird commitment from Parker Kelly as a forward. He fully commits to getting that puck along the wall. And when he doesn’t, this is bad. Don’t do this. And then it gets worse. Wedgewood makes the initial save as you have the deep pairing Manson coming in to help defend. But as he makes the initial save, I don’t really understand what he does. He doesn’t seem to track the puck at all and pushes towards the middle of his crease as the puck just seems to float out. He’s looking down. He doesn’t know where the puck is. And yeah, he’s beat because of that. Nashville’s power play is one of the few teams in the NHL that’s worse than the ABS and you just don’t play defense to give up that goal. Yeah, the ABS are confusing. To be fair, Wedgewood back in at net for this game after coming back from a little bit of an injury. He did not look very good in this first period. Neither the defense nor the goalending would get better in the middle of the period and the Predators would score again about 90 seconds later. Part of the reason faceoffs are stupid. Nelson wins this faceoff clean and it just doesn’t matter. Taves isn’t able to get an effective clear on the puck. Macar also doesn’t manage the puck super well. It’s chaos back in the corner and the puck squirts out and then the ABS are just too slow to effectively get back. You’d love to see Manson get involved in this play. You’d love to see an extra step here from Landisog. Did I say Manson? I meant Nelson. You guys know what I meant. Uh they aren’t quick enough to be competitive to help out their deep pairing here. And then Wedgewood after last time losing the puck, this one goes wide. It is a harder spot for him, but it’s a very poor push off of his post. He’s not able to get across and stop this one. An NHL goalie might want to save there. Some messiness and some defensive slop. This is somewhat forgivable. It happens in hockey. You got to be able to bounce back and the ABS do that. These clips are coming hot and fast, but it’s a tie game about midway through the first. ABS top line going through the neutral zone here. McKinnon gets the zone, pulls up on the brakes, and kind of takes too long to really make a decision with this puck. He just gets challenged by every pred on the ice, and one eventually takes it away from him. Thankfully, the pres are bad, so they flub a zone clearing attempt, and McKinnon’s able to reather the puck, and the ABS maintain possession. Marty gets the puck on the half ball here. Leki’s battling for position in front, so Marty just throws it in there and hopes for something good. That’s exactly what he gets. The initial rebound, poorly played by Sorrowos. He’s like he is able to turn around, be stronger than a guy who is significantly bigger than him, work his way to this puck and finish it. Pucks the net. Hard work. You’ve heard it all before. It’s still good stuff from the ABS top line. And that marked the end of the scoring for a while. The rest of the first period was relatively even. The ABS do take another penalty, but they kill that one. And then you get into the second period where the ABS strictly dominate Nashville. They spend the entire period in control and they look really dangerous for a good portion of it and they don’t score. That isn’t great. You want them to finish, but you don’t mind them playing good hockey. One problem crops up though. In the final six or so minutes of the period, the ABS get two and a half power play opportunities. They also don’t score on any of those. So, you go into the third period, it’s a bit of a split power play, but you don’t score on that either. And the score is 2-2. Despite the ABS dominating for the past 2122 minutes, anyone who has watched hockey long enough knows this feeling. That stretch of hockey where you probably deserve to be winning the game, but you’re not. And because you’re not, you know something is going to bounce the other way. It takes a while into the third, but that bounce does happen. Look, I think the Sam pairing has actually been quite good for the Colorado Avalanche, but they face one problem. when they get stuck in their own end, they’re on the smaller side and they’re going to lose some physical battles for the puck. It’s going to happen. It’s something you understand with this pairing and Nashville’s able to maintain possession because of that. They get it back out high. We’re going to see a puck just get floated in here. Nice little give and go on the blue line, I guess. But there’s not a ton going on here. ABS are trying to recover a lost stick for Molinsky. It’s chaos in front. There’s no way Wedgwood’s going to be able to see through all the trees. And this thing is literally just a floater. Not even a particularly good shot and it just goes in. I think a good portion of this is no one’s to be blamed. The ABS played pretty well and some bounces didn’t go their way and that’s hockey. You lose some games. But the ABS also have to shoulder a good amount of the blame here. The ABS power play is just not good enough. This was supposed to be the game where the ABS special teams cost them one. Hasn’t really happened yet this year. And I think even though what we’re about to talk about is a power play goal, you can probably still blame special teams for this one. One, you need a better PK against one of the worst power plays in the league. And two, you need your power play to be better when it’s an actual power play. We’ll talk about it more in a second. The ABS probably should have lost this game in regulation. They get a very late power play opportunity and a sixon four situation. Maybe there’s some version of breaking the curse here at least. A couple of things to point out, mostly to say, why don’t these things happen when it’s five on four? Do you really need it to be six on four for this? Nathan McKinnon moves his feet, does a great job here. Ranges from the half wall all the way down in behind the goal line. That opens up a ton of space for Nas to work with off of this puck. Nius decides to float out high here. Puck does bobble on him a little bit, so he does have to control it, but could be a legitimate threat here before feeding to Macar. You have good movement on the far side as well. You throw two bodies in front. Yes, it’s a six on four, so you have an extra body there, but there’s a lot of good movement to like here. And it’s ultimately Kale Mar with a beautiful shimmy. And then for the first time this season, he actually puts one in the net. Look, scoring with 8 seconds left is great. Scoring on the power play is great. The ABS did do that. They deserve some credit for this goal, and they do not get at least one point out of this game without it. So, props to that. But let’s be honest here. This is a niche situation sixon four power play where it’s just not something you can repeat feasibly. It’s not something you can use on your actual five on four power play. It’s pure desperation from the ABS and it worked. Yes. But the ABS power play is the only reason they needed this nonsense to work. Had they taken care of business in the earlier power plays of this game, they would have had a lead going into the third period and this would have been a completely different game. Who knows what that third period looks like, but the ABS would have done a much better job of setting themselves up to win this game instead of having to get lucky with desperate nonsense to scrap out one point. Make no mistake, this sixon four goal does not solve any of the issues the ABS power play has, and it has to get better. As mentioned though, if Kale Mar starts scoring more power play goals like he did here, if he can do that at five on four, yeah, that would make the ABS power play better. So maybe there’s something you can take there and hope fixes the power play. You got to give the ABS credit. They never quit. No matter what. Whether it’s a night where they should have played better, where they deserve better, or where they were worse and deserve to lose. Whatever the situation, they keep playing down to the final buzzer, and they find ways to scrap things out. That is absolutely the sign of a great team. Even if they don’t know how to get it over the finish line in extra time. This overtime was actually pretty fun. We haven’t seen much of that this year. usually slow puck possession nonsense. Both teams were going up and down the ice and shooting the puck. There weren’t any true true gradea chances or fast breaks or oddman rushes or whatever, but there were opportunities. Neither team gets solved though. And while the ABS are not good at overtime, they are far far worse at the shootout. So not getting it done in overtime, we all pretty much know that the ABS lost at that point. The ABS shooters go 0 for three in the shootout. They do not score a shootout goal. They don’t even look competitive for the most part if we’re honest. I can’t explain it to you. But, uh, the ABS are bad at that. First shooter is Ryan O’Reilly, and he scores. I don’t think the ABS have stopped the first shooter in any of their four shootouts so far this year. Also bad. And this is all fine and well. The ABS are bad at shootouts. You would like them to be better. They’re not. I can’t help you there. It’s not going to change. Unlike the power play, which you need to improve, and the ABS have to get better at to find consistent success in a way other than five on five, the solution to the shootout to me is just win the game before you get to one. You want to be bad at the shootout? Fine. Don’t go there anymore. But it’s the AB, so something weird has to happen. On the second shootout attempt, Philip Forsber runs into Scott Wedgewood and knocks him over. It’s pretty harsh. It doesn’t look great. Now, Forsber, I don’t believe did this on purpose and he was immediately right next to Wedgewood apologizing, trying to say, “Hey, man, that’s I didn’t try to do that. That’s all fine. I nothing against Forsber here.” But it did kind of stir an idea in my head. Goalies are so well protected in every other situation in the NHL. Goalie interference is completely out of control. Nobody knows when it is or when it isn’t. Anytime a goalie gets touched, you see goalies fly and flop all over the place. and they regularly call goalie interference or at least blow the plate dead because a goalie gets knocked around unless your name is Scott Wedgewood apparently. Two things happen here. One, my idea there appears to be nothing stopping a player from just crashing into a goalender in a shootout. And like obviously if you just skate as hard as you can and crash into him, you’re going to get suspended for a billion games and don’t do that. But if you come down and make a genuine shootout attempt and then kind of accidentally on purpose crash into a goalender, you could honestly give your team an advantage in that shootout. To me, it just feels like there should be some sort of punishment for crashing into a goalie in the shootout. And this is not even like an ABS bias thing. For years, the ABS have had guys that do that. Evan Rodriguez had a great shootout move that ended up with him running into the goalie pretty regularly for the ABS. I don’t think that should count. But instead of rambling about rules that aren’t going to happen, my bigger problem here, that was the second shooter for Nashville. Wedgewood stops the third shooter for Nashville, which is Steven Stamco. Stops him, made the play, the whole play develops. And then in between that shot getting saved and Gabe Landiskog being the third shooter for the ABS, a concussion spotter pulls Scott Wedgewood from the game. I’m sorry, but that’s unacceptable. If the collision with Forsber was enough to have a concussion spotter pull Scott Wedgewood, he needed to be pulled before the third shot. Otherwise, you’re risking significant injury if you believe he qualifies for concussion spotting. Now, I’m no specialist when it comes to concussion spotting. I don’t really know anything about the job, but if you are trained to do that, you need to protect the players. It’s not like this is a bang bang thing. The Forsber play happens. There’s a bunch of time for Wedgewood to recover from the hit and then the ABS second shooter goes and you watch all these replays and there’s plenty of downtime where Wedgewood could have been pulled before Nashville’s third shooter and he wasn’t. It’s the type of stuff that is fake protecting the players from injury and really isn’t accomplishing anything if you let him stay in the game only to then pull him later, which by the way, the game was over at that point. Just let Landy shoot. You knew the ABS weren’t going to score and the game’s done. everyone can go down the tunnels and Wedgewood can go get concussion treatment or not, whatever. Instead, you make a whole big scene of making yourself look honestly stupid as a league. Do better. And that’s it. The ABS end up losing this one. Does losing to Nashville suck? Yeah, you lost to one of the worst teams in the league. It happens. Dallas lost to Calgary in a shootout earlier this year. Also one of the worst teams in the league. So, it’s not like the ABS are on their own in this category. The ABS played pretty well. They didn’t convert enough and their weaknesses showed out in the ugliest ways in this game. They also dragged a point out of this game by scoring a power play goal. So, the abs are confusing. I don’t know. They’re still also great. So, yeah, I’ll stick with the great stuff. That is the end of this game video review. Thank you for watching. I am Rudo and I’m confused.

The Colorado Avalanche are a perplexing hockey team, possessing greatness with a few specific flaws that are hard to understand. Goals from Nelson, Lehkonen, and a last-minute goal from Makar earn the Avs one point, but the shootout costs them the extra.

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