Avalanche-Hurricanes Game Review: Jost Dandy

Wow, what a weird win. But when you’re a really good hockey team, like the Colorado Avalanche now is again, you get some cheapie wins like that.

Despite being outplayed and outshot for large swaths of the game, the Avs beat the Carolina Hurricanes 3-2 on Friday night, to move them to within three points of the first-place St. Louis Blues for not only the Central Division lead, but that of the entire Western Conference. And, the Avs have two games in hand on the Blues, with the final game of the regular season to be held in Denver against the Blues.

A brilliant feed from Gabe Landeskog to Sam Girard, with a little more than four minutes left in the hockey game, resulted in Girard roofing a wrist shot to the right arm of ‘Canes goalie Anton Forsberg for the tiebreaking goal. Avs goalie Pavel Francouz (45 saves) allowed two third-period goals that tied the game for Carolina, but otherwise made a boatload of tough saves in outplaying Forsberg. The Hurricanes outshot the Avalanche 47-32.

I did a nice ReverseDaterJinx earlier in the game on Girard, so I take full credit for this happening.

If only Sam Girard could finish off plays in which he's beaten everybody about 90% so far to that point, he might win multiple Norris trophies

— Adrian Dater (@adater) February 29, 2020

About an hour after this tweet, Girard finished off the Landeskog crossing pass like my 16-year-old, 6-foot-5 teenage son finishes off a couple of cheeseburgers from McDonald’s.

Sam Girard goal if anyone of my #GoAvsGo Followers missed it or anyone interested pic.twitter.com/wSTVeTByQv

— Lucas Parmenter (@LucasParmenter) February 29, 2020

Wow, what a great game for Girard. He was superb at both ends, covering up ably for a few mistakes by his defensive partner, Erik Johnson, in his own end. Johnson threw a couple of pucks away in the third period, with only disaster averted because Girard grabbed pucks off Canes’ sticks and skated it out of danger.

His finish of the Landeskog battle-win for the puck in the corner and dish cross-ice was as good a closing job as Shelley “The Machine” Levine did to Bruce and Harriett Nyborg (look it up, kids).

We haven’t even talked about Tyson Jost yet. Does that picture of him above not say it all? That’s a man who had a little something to get off his chest there, after scoring his second of two goals on the night. After 36 straight games, Jost scored twice in the win.

That’s all Jost has to do, is finish off some of the chances he creates for himself with really fast, quick interior edges. He’s very fast to loose pucks, so the only thing missing has been closing out at least a modest majority of those chances. We’ll see how this game reflects on Jost’s game moving forward. Don’t forget, he had a hat trick early on the season against Tampa Bay. He’s got seven goals on the season now, with five of the seven coming in two games.

More consistency is the key.

My biggest question now, and probably moving forward in the next two weeks: How do you sit Francouz for the playoff stretch/or-the-actual-playoffs, assuming Grubauer comes back in two-three weeks? Won’t Grubauer be at the risk of too much inactivity heading into the postseason? How do you sit a guy who entered this game sixth in the NHL in saves percentage, at .927? That was before stopping 45-of-47 shots tonight.

This will be a HOT TOPIC OF CONVERSATION, when we come time to cross this bridge (in case you didn’t know it, it’s “Cliche Night” for me).

I don’t see how you sit Frankie even when Grubi is back. Grubi can’t complain about life being unfair for injured No. 1 goalies, should he not get the starter job back upon return, because he stole Semyon Varlamov’s starting job in the same fashion Frankie is doing right now.

That’s hockey, as someone once said.

MORE OBSERVATIONS

• Great game for Cale Makar tonight, too. Wow, was he flying offensively, and he set up Jost’s second goal, in the second period, with a great lead pass.
• Andre Burakovsky returned from that upper-body injury, skating on the top line with Landeskog and Nathan MacKinnon.
• Pierre-Edouard Bellemare and Vladislav Kamenev both were shaken up after hits to the ice, but both returned to play the full game.
• Jost now has three points in the last two games since being written off in some quarters as definitely getting traded at the deadline.

Here are your game highlights: