Avs lose 3-1 to Wild, but there were a couple of positives

Full admission here: I did not see one second of tonight’s game between the Avalanche and Minnesota Wild. And, I bet you didn’t either. This was one of the really rare times in our modern age where there was NO TV or streaming of the game tonight. So, I listened to the full game on the radio, and let me just doff my chapeau here to Avs radio play-by-play man Conor McGahey for painting many floral images of the game in my imagination with his sonicism. He is really good at his job. The Avs have always had great announcers, and Conor McGahey is no exception.

I probably didn’t need a TV to get the gist of tonight’s game, though: The Avs, with their lineup of depth veterans and rookie hopefuls, didn’t fare all that well. The final score was 3-1, but it didn’t really sound as close as that.

And that leads me to one positive, at least as far as I can tell: Darcy Kuemper seemed to play pretty well. I’m damning with faint praise here. This effort by the Avs tonight wasn’t much to write home about, which is why this post will be fairly brief.

Avs were outshot 32-16, with only a late Alex Newhook goal to prevent a Wild whitewash. Lots of zeroes across the board for Avalanche forwards in this one otherwise.

But Kemps seemed to have a good showing. He stopped 29-of-32 shots in going the distance against his former team. The play was in the Avs most of the game, but Kemps made a lot of three-alarm saves it seemed like – at least from the high pitch of McGahey’s vocal cords in those moments.

The Avs play Tuesday night against Vegas at Ball Arena, and let’s hope we see some of their best players finally in this preseason. That means guys like Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar and Mikko Rantanen. None of them have played yet, and while the preseason is truly meaningless, it would still be nice to see them out there doing what Stan and Josh Kroenke are paying them millions of dollars per year to do.

Until tomorrow, when we get the lineups…