Adrian Dater
EDMONTON, ALBERTA – I’ll be honest, the moment I thought the Avalanche might be in trouble for the second round of the playoffs came right after they’d just finished destroying the Arizona Coyotes in the first round of the playoffs.
Nathan MacKinnon and Gabe Landeskog were on the dais, fielding questions from me here in Edmonton and the rest of the Avs media back home on the couch. After the 7-1 closeout win over the Coyotes, MacKinnon said the attitude of the team was that “we’ve felt like our time has arrived.”
Landeskog said, “I think we’re ready to make that next step, no doubt. We’ve been a group that for the most part has been together for the last three, four years. We’ve grown together and we’ve been through the bad. But the group we have in the locker room has a lot of character and we’ve seen the product we can put on the ice.”
They did it again, I thought. They’re getting ahead of themselves, talking as if they’ve actually won something. Why are they spiking the football when they’re still only at the 30-yard line?
Look, I’m not trying to be Mr. 20/20 Hindsight here, Mr. Monday Morning Quarterback. It’s just been my observation about this young core group of Avalanche players over the years that they tend to take their foot off the gas when some prosperity comes their way. Sunday’s first-period disaster of a Game 4 here at Rogers Place was another example of an Avs team that probably felt real good about itself after a stirring Game 4 win over the Dallas Stars and maybe thought things would come easier for them suddenly.
It didn’t. It sure didn’t. The Avs flat-out did not come to play in Game 4, putting forth an effort that disgraced themselves and the game of hockey. The Avs did not get their first shot on goal until 1:34 was left on the clock in the first period. They overpassed, didn’t move their feet, dilly-dallied with the puck and took some stupid penalties en route to a 3-0 deficit.
The Avalanche, to their credit, kept playing and made things interesting, cutting it to 3-2 after two period after a 17-shot 20 minutes. But things swung back in Dallas’ favor again. The Avs started the third with 1:24 of power-play time, and they overpassed themselves out of getting the equalizer. MacKinnon had a great chance, alone by the left circle, at the end of the power play, but he decided to dish it in the middle to Nazem Kadri, whose back was turned toward the net and in no position to shoot. It was pretty much the capper to a terrible day for the top line.
Tyson Jost took a tripping penalty in the offensive zone when it was 3-2, and those penalties are almost always a killer. Sure enough, it went to 5-2 from there. The Avs cut it to 5-4 with 3.6 seconds left, but, yeah: Too little, too late.
This team still just isn’t mentally ready to take the next step. That’s just my opinion. But, to me, that’s what’s wrong with this team still. It’s got a lot of excellent young players and the future should be very bright still. But when you have that kind of miserable start like the Avs did, it just tells me one big thing: That’s on the leadership group of this team. That’s on guys like the captain and the coach and the other top guys. Right from that very first shift, in which the Landeskog-MacKinnon-Rantanen line was outworked by the fourth line of Dallas that includes former Av Blake Comeau, this team just looked like a collection of zombies. Dallas looked like it wanted it more – they have pretty much this whole series – and they earned it. The Avs’ bench was dead the whole day. All I heard was Dallas yelling stuff to each other from the bench the whole game.
I asked Jared Bednar afterward if he sensed his team lacked energy before the game tonight, or if anything else might be amiss mentally.
“Not at all,” Bednar said. “We had some good talks today, some good meetings the last couple days.”
So, it’s a mystery then. Don’t trot out the injury excuse either. Of course, it’s hurt not having Erik Johnson and Matt Calvert and Joonas Donskoi and Philipp Grubauer. Of course it has. But the Stars are missing a Vezina-caliber goalie themselves in Ben Bishop.
Speaking of goaltending: that’s the other major reason for this loss today. Pavel Francouz was terrible in that first period, just looking sloppy and out of position and nervous around the puck. He’s given up goals in bunches in this series, and that wears on a team mentally. If you don’t have faith in your goalie, you start to play nervous as well, and that’s exactly how the Avalanche looked that whole first period. Francouz has shown a bad tendency to flop on his back or his side when there is heavy traffic in his crease, and it’s leading to some easy rebound goals. I thought he would be better than this, for sure, after a very good regular season, but the fact is his play has been a big liability in this series.
“He’s gotta be better, for sure,” Jared Bednar said of Francouz.
I don’t know what the solution is there. The Avalanche have Francouz and Grubauer signed for next season, but if Frankie is, at best, a good backup goalie and Grubauer can never stay healthy for long, then Joe Sakic might have his hand forced in the off-season. Braden Holtby will be a free agent, and Marc-Andre Fleury might become available from Vegas.
These young, talented Avs are only going to be young for so long. Landeskog will have been in the league for a decade starting next year. MacKinnon has been here seven seasons now. This series technically isn’t over, but let’s face it: it almost certainly is over.
This Avs team had a real opportunity to advance further than they did last year. But the reality is, they’re one loss away from bowing out of the second round for a second straight year. Last year, they made it to a Game 7 against the Sharks.
The Avs seemed to really think they could do it, too. But it’s starting to look like it was all just a lot of talk.