Adrian Dater
GLENDALE, Ariz. – Unlike the previous night, Jared Bednar tried to look at the positives in his team’s 3-0 loss – a game that included a first period in which the Colorado Avalanche was outshot 17-8 and outscored 2-0.
Veteran defenseman Erik Johnson, however, wasn’t in the mood to sugarcoat anything.
“That was one of our worst starts in a while,” Johnson told Colorado Hockey Now after the loss, Colorado’s fifth in six games (1-4-1). “That was a really bad start for us. Could have been much worse if Frankie (Pavel Francouz) wasn’t as good as he was. We’ve been talking the last couple days about being ready to play and having a sense of urgency to start the game, and for whatever reason, it was pretty bad.”
Bednar ripped into his team for its first-period start of Friday night at home, and I was waiting for another rip job when I asked him about the start this time. But the coach went easy on them in a way. Not that he was happy, but Bednar said, “I didn’t mind our first five minutes or so. Clearly, Arizona is a team firing on all cylinders right now. We just weren’t in the same gear as they were in the first period, that’s for sure. Sometimes, when you talk to your team about stuff, it takes them a little bit longer to figure it out. I’m gonna choose to look at the positives out of that. although it was very similar to last night, as a result, the second period and the way we started to dig in and started to work – I haven’t seen us work that hard in quite some time.”
The first period was not good, no matter how you look at it. The Avs just gave the puck away way too many times. They were just flat out sloppy with the puck and, it’s true, Francouz gave them a chance with 15 saves. He did allow a horrible goal to Phil Kessel that made it 2-0 and seemed to deflate the entire team, but Francouz was not the problem tonight.
Johnson said it is time for leaders of the team to get the team ready to play, which was his way of politely saying he needs to be better too.
“You gotta look in the mirror and be better,” Johnson said. “When you’re down some top players, the easy thing to do, I think, is to just be ‘it’s ok, these guys are out’, but you can’t do that. You’ll be in trouble real quick if you do. The mindset has to be to step up in those guys’ absences. We talked at length today and watched video. It’s too bad, because our goalie was ready to play and was lights out at the start. Odd-man rushes, breakaways, so hats off to him. We gotta be better going forward.”