Early word on MacKinnon seems to be that he’s OK

It wouldn’t be an Avalanche game if we weren’t all clutching the pearls afterward, worried about the health of one of the team’s best players. So it was tonight too, with a third-period exit from the game by Nathan MacKinnon following a blindside hit to the head from Sharks player Joachim Blichfeld.

Blichfeld, a Danish forward playing in just his fourth career game, hit MacKinnon from the side in the third period here:

Match penalty assessed to Joachim Blichfeld for an illegal check to the head of MacKinnon. Not enough of the body and main contact is the head. MacKinnon to the room pic.twitter.com/AHVOZrV9eD

— NHL Safety Watch (@NHLSafetyWatch) March 4, 2021

A dirty hit, no question about it, one that will absolutely get the young Dane suspended. The question, of course, after the game was: how is MacKinnon?

Well, Gabe Landeskog and Jared Bednar both had positive things to say.

“Nate seems to be doing OK,” Landeskog said.

Said Bednar: “He seems to be doing good. I think we got lucky on it. As of right now, he seems to be fine.”

This whole thing brings up the question on the minds of many Avs fans: Do the Avs need to get a player who is a “tough guy” who can help address some of this stuff? Why do the Avs always seem to be the ones getting these kinds of things happening to them? Why are they always the receivers of big hits and not the deliverers of them? When are they going to start kicking some ass out there and let teams know this stuff won’t stand anymore?

This is the year 2021, so all of my questions there might be hopelessly outdated. But maybe not. The book on the Avs is to hit them and try to hurt them. That was the Dallas Stars playbook in the playoffs, and they won the series. Yeah, there was just some bad luck involved for the Avs with their injuries in that series, but do I need to go find clips of the times Jamie Benn and Corey Perry were out there hacking and whacking and hitting Avs players, with not much done back to them?

When will Avs players become the initiators and not the retaliators all the time?

The Avs said they “responded” well to the hit, but they were talking about on the scoreboard, with a subsequent power-play goal. Uh, no, that’s not the kind of response fans wanted, though. They wanted a pound of flesh taken out of the Sharks too, but we didn’t see it. And that will definitely be noted in the books of future Avs opponents, who saw not much of a physical response done to the Sharks after the hit. They might just be writing in their notebooks, “MacKinnon leveled with cheap shot, and not a single Shark paid for it the rest of the game.”

Let’s see what tomorrow brings from the medical tent, one that is growing increasingly crowded again with Avalanche bodies.