Adrian Dater
One win and seven losses now, in the last eight games that have counted – including four straight when they really counted. One win and three losses after the first four games of the 2021-22 season, with the aggregate score 15-7 in the last three games. A game with the two-time defending Stanley Cup champions in their barn Saturday night.
This isn’t how the bookmakers foresaw the Colorado Avalanche’s start to the season, not when they were made the odds-on favorite to win the next Stanley Cup. But, Gabe Landeskog, for one, isn’t worried.
“Hey, we’ve got 78 games left,” Landeskog said after the Avs’ 4-1 loss to the Florida Panthers Thursday night at FLA Live Arena, which dropped his team to 1-3-0, the team’s third straight loss. “It’s a good lesson early in the season. … Not worried at all. We’ll get out of it.”
Hey, the captain knows his locker room better than we do. But if my Twitter feed was any indication tonight, Avs fans are plenty worried about the state of their team. I wrote the other night how I’m already a bit worried about this group, and while I haven’t changed my immediate thought on that, I actually thought the Avs were pretty good for a lot of the game tonight. At least, through the first 39 minutes. But a bad goal with a minute left in the second just kind of deflated everything, and the Avs looked and played like a demoralized team in the third.
One of the things we knew about this Avs team going into the season: they are going to have to win games more with defense and goaltending than last year’s loaded offensive group. But so far, they’re not getting much of either. The Panthers dropped 38 shots on Avs goalie Jonas Johansson, who was pretty good for those first 39 minutes, but then let in a softie that sent the Avs into the dressing room down that 3-1 score.
The Avs are just giving up too many good scoring chances to the opposition right now, and not getting timely saves. And, for some reason, top defenseman Cale Makar has looked, well, awful of late. He was a minus-5 in Tuesday’s loss in Washington, and was a minus-3 tonight. And, it could have been worse than that, as Johansson made saves after a couple of pure Makar giveaways. Is Makar playing hurt, from that off-season “procedure” the team said he had? Whatever, Makar just doesn’t look like the sublime player, at all, like he’s almost always been so far.
The Avs did get a couple bad calls go against them in this one, including a really soft goalie interference call on Mikko Rantanen that led to Florida getting a power-play goal and a 2-1 lead in the second, after Rantanen had tied the game 1-1 in the first. Landeskog was called for a dubious boarding call on Aaron Ekblad at the end, too, which killed any hopes of a late comeback.
Jared Bednar probably wanted to go there, but he didn’t.
“I’m not going to comment on the officiating,” Bednar said. “We’ve got enough things to worry about in our locker room, and officiating isn’t one of them.”
Bednar said, ‘I liked our start”, but that the difference, for him, was the second period.
“We didn’t capitalize on our chances,” Bednar said. “It was definitely a step in the right direction, but still not good enough to win the hockey game. I liked our start tonight. More purpose to our game in a lot of different areas…but I didn’t like the goals against we gave up. A little too easy for them”
I actually thought the period the Avs failed to capitalize was the first, when they outshot Florida 11-6. But they gave up 23 shots in the second, while getting 12 themselves. The defense just wasn’t nearly good enough, the forechecking not hard enough, the special teams not good enough.
So, now it’s on to Tampa, where the Cup champion Lightning await.
“We need to be more desperate. We need to get more sustained pressure down low,” Landeskog said. “We’ve got to work. A good chance to do it on Saturday.”
The final sheet:
