Frei: Avalanche Again the Best Show in Town

At Empower Field at Mile High, the Broncos were finishing off a desultory 7-10 season, at least having the character to show up and give a professional effort in their 28-24 loss to the Patrick Mahomes-led Chiefs.

If anyone with tickets to both games had gotten the boos out of their system at the football game, hoping they were considered part of a fan referendum on the state of the franchise, and then made the short walk over to Ball Arena, the contrast they witnessed was jarring.

Trailing 3-0 in the first period and 4-1 as late as the second period to another of the NHL’s best teams, the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Avalanche came back to win 5-4 on the strength of defenseman Devan Toews’ goal 72 seconds into overtime.

There was so much more to it than that, of course, including the electric Arizonan, Auston Matthews, scoring twice for the Maple Leafs, and Avalanche winger Mikko Rantanen turning uncanny setup man with four assists mostly of the threading-the-needle variety. And, Pavel Francouz coming on in relief of the yanked Darcy Kuemper to stop 18 of 19 shots and help keep the Avalanche in it.

This is gross oversimplification, and perhaps even lazy, but what we saw Saturday was that it comes down to this:

The bumbling Broncos don’t know how to win.

The Avs, winning their 11th straight at home, do.

The NFL the previous weekend moved the Broncos-Chiefs game from Sunday to Saturday, so it was conceivable that many fans planning to make a sporting weekend of it — not to mention season ticket holders for both the Broncos and Avalanche — ended up with digital tickets for both in their smartphones.

Heck, maybe even some Chiefs fans arrived late and joined Canadian transplants at Ball Arena. (Kansas  City had an NHL team from 1974 to ’76 before the Scouts moved to … Denver.)

Whether it was because of traffic issues for the overlapping games over anything else, the sellout crowd at the arena was in many cases late-arriving.

Once they settled in, whether it was their first NHL game complete with rules explanations from companions (“icing happen when the puck come down…”), or they’ve been there for every one of Jake Schroeder’s 1,000-plus anthems, they witnessed a great show.

It wasn’t only because the home team staged the stirring comeback, with the goals eventually coming from Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar, Gabriel Landeskog, J.T. Compher and Toews. The Avalanche are 21-8-2 overall and 17-3-1 after a 4-5-1 start.

“I thought it was awesome,” Avalanche coach Jared Bednar said of the environment. “Joe (Sakic) even said, ‘If you’re just coming to watch our team, or those two teams, for the first time, or hockey in general, and you watch that game, you’re going to be hooked to come back.’ That was an exciting game. The stars showed up.”

It all pivoted from Bednar’s decision to pull Kuemper after Matthews’ second goal made it 3-0 at 14:50 of the first. Because of a lower body injury and COVID-protocol issues, it was only Francouz’s second appearance of the season for the Avalanche.

Bluntly, in part because the Avalanche has been trying to build up and portray Kuemper as the answer, rather than as just another serviceable journeyman in net, my reaction was that it might be premature to make the change.

I was … well … I was … 

All involved, including the Kuemper teammates brought to the interview area, emphasized the predictable — and somewhat justified — point that it was about message sending and changing up.

“I was sending it to our whole team, yeah,” Bednar said. “First period, my take on it was that we were getting outworked badly. . . We just couldn’t handle physically their one on one. We weren’t handling the down-low pressure and to me, that was work and competitiveness and they were lighting us up.

“So at that point, we needed to change something. I don’t put that on Kemps at all. I’d love to see him come up with one of those, make a big save. We’ve seen him do it in the past and he just wasn’t finding it and we were continuing to give up too many chances. I was just trying to send a message to our group.”

It worked. And it worked on a day when the Avalanche didn’t have a full-team morning skate because of the early start.

“I decided to take it minute by minute,” Francouz said. “I felt like we really changed our game as a team after I stepped in, so most of the time I was just watching our team playing in their zone. It was a great hockey game.”

The Avalanche ended up outshooting the Maple Leafs 49-27, with rejuvenated mostly AHL journeyman Jack Campbell often making terrific saves. And at the other end, Francouz — who played four games for the Colorado Eagles on a rehab assignment before rejoining the Avalanche — was solid.

“I thought he was great,” Bednar said. “Especially coming in cold. He skated this morning, did some work this morning for a 5 o’clock game trying to get ready for Seattle (Monday). I knew he’d be warm because I saw him all day. Most of our team wasn’t here until right before the game.”

Francouz got the win when Toews beat Campbell through the 5-hole.

“We went for a change,” Toews said. “I think they had one or two bodies still out that were a little tired there. . . We were trying to keep possession as much as we could with the guys we had on the ice. (Nazem Kadri) popped middle there and I think they cheated it a little but, so I was able to jump down. The D-man kind of slid over to Mikko and gave me some room.”

So the Avalanche still has scored a league-high 4.3 goals per game, but the the lingering skepticism is about whether Kuemper is the answer in the net for a team with Stanley Cup aspirations and expectations. Former Avs forward Dave Reid again mentioned those concerns on the NHL Network Saturday night.

It’s also probably unfair to ignore that the Avalanche’s gaudy offensive numbers come with some sacrifice to their defensive zealousness in front of the goalie … any goalie.

Some nights, of course, that goalie is going to be counted on to steal two points.

Terry Frei (terry@terryfrei.com) is a Denver-based author and journalist. He has been named a state’s sports writer of the year seven times in peer voting — four times in Colorado and three times in Oregon. His seven books include the novels “Olympic Affair” and “The Witch’s Season.” Among his five non-fiction works are “Horns, Hogs, and Nixon Coming,” “Third Down and a War to Go,” “March 1939: Before the Madness,” and “’77: Denver, the Broncos, and a Coming of Age.” He also collaborated with Adrian Dater on “Save By Roy,” was a long-time vice president of the Professional Hockey Writers Association and has covered the hockey Rockies, Avalanche and the NHL at-large. His web site is www.terryfrei.com and his bio is available at www.terryfrei.com/bio.html

His Colorado Hockey Now column archive can be accessed here