Colorado did not lose three consecutive games in regulation all regular season, so it was surprising to see them lose the first three games of the series against Vegas, who finished 26 points lower in the Western Conference standings.<\/p>\n
The Avalanche had a 3-0 first-period lead in Game 3 on Sunday and gave up three goals in the second on their way to a 5-3 loss.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think our team\u2019s played with more intensity and more desperation as the series has gone on and it hasn\u2019t worked out for us yet,\u201d Colorado coach Jared Bednar said. \u201cThe hill to climb, it\u2019s definitely a tough one, it just doesn\u2019t happen very often and we\u2019re certainly understanding of that. But I think we have a lot of pride and a lot of character in our room, and we displayed that time over time throughout the course of the year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThis will be our most difficult challenge, but I believe we will show up and we will be ready to play, ready to compete for a win tomorrow night.\u201d<\/p>\n
Making the task more daunting for Colorado is that defenseman Cale Makar<\/a> seems to be playing through an upper-body injury and forward Nathan MacKinnon<\/a> sustained a leg injury blocking a shot Sunday and is uncertain for Game 4.<\/p>\n Makar missed the first two games of the series and returned for Game 3.<\/p>\n Vegas won 4-2 in Game 1, holding off Colorado after building a 3-0 lead and closing the game out with an empty-net goal. In Game 2, Vegas scored two goals in a span of 2:07 in the third period to overcome a 1-0 deficit and then added an empty netter for the 3-1 final.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very evenly matched and the games have shown that. They\u2019ve come out on top of three of them,\u201d Bednar said. \u201cCertainly, would love it only to be two, especially after last night, building a three-goal lead. But we are where we are now, and we know how fine the margins are, and we have to keep trying to exploit them and trying to make one more play than we have in the previous games, both on the offensive side and on the defensive side, to win a hockey game. When you look at it from that perspective, I think it becomes a lot more realistic.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Colorado did not lose three consecutive games in regulation all regular season, so it was surprising to see…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":583678,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5116],"tags":[193,192,144,5277,5,4],"class_list":["post-583677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-colorado-avalanche","tag-avalanche","tag-colorado","tag-colorado-avalanche","tag-coloradoavalanche","tag-hockey","tag-nhl"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nhl\/116637881011268630","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=583677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583677\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/583678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=583677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=583677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nhl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=583677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}