Frei: This was an easy sweep for Avs, but second-round mental hurdle is next (+)

NASHVILLE — Favorites at least on the Western Conference side of the Stanley Cup playoff bracket, the Avalanche swept aside an overwhelmed first-round opponent in four games and advanced to the second round.

They seemed to be rolling.

Planners in Mayor Hancock’s office were at least provisionally plotting the parade route, pondering whether a shoulder-to-shoulder packing of fans into Civic Center Park was wise or even possible.

Sound familiar?

But enough about last year and the first-round sweep of the St. Louis Blues.

On Monday night, the Avalanche finished off the four-game sweep of the Predators in the 2022 first round, winning 5-3  at Bridgestone Arena.

Trailing 3-2 in the third period, the Avs got goals from Devon Toews and Valeri Nichushkin 3:07 apart to take the lead and went on to the win.

Nathan MacKinnon clinched it with an empty-netter with 55.9 seconds left.

“Just resilient,” said Cale Makar, who had a goal and two assists and again put on a show on the day he also was named a Norris Trophy finalist. “We knew that we were going to get their absolute best tonight. We just tried to weather the storm  whenever they were pushing. Every time we got a goal, it seems like they’d come back at the end of the period. Credit to the guys. I felt like we stepped it up in the third period in an away building, and that’s what you have to do in the playoffs.”

Andre Burakovsky also had a goal and two assists for the Avs, and his scoring-opening goal at 1:56 of the first was a curiosity. His shot went through the net and the play continued. At the next stoppage a review confirmed it was a goal.

The win buys time for the Avalanche, who will face the Blues or Wild in the next round. That’s a week off for Darcy Kuemper’s swollen eye to heal, or just for rest in pro sports’ most physically and mentally testing postseason.

“The big thing is now we can take a breath,” said Avalanche coach Jared Bednar. “Get a couple of days off for our guys and give them some rest, And we’ll still get some real good practice time before our next opponent.”

Of course, that guarantees nothing, considering the Avs had a week off between the first and second rounds a year ago.

(By the way, it’s not raining on the parade, so to speak, to bring up what happened a year ago. That looking back, in fact, can be part of the Avalanche motivation.)

“Any time you get a chance to end a team’s season, you take it and run,” Makar said.

When it was over, he had a brief exchange in the handshake line with one of the other two Norris finalists, the Preds’ Roman Josi.

“Obviously very honored,” Makar said of being a finalist again. “You have an unbelievable defenseman on the other side as well, Josi, who I looked up to a lot growing up and even through this entire year, pushing me to be better, so it’s cool. That’s not something that I really thought of. It’s just in the background … As long as I can help the team and contribute, it’s not about those individual things.”

MacKinnon noted, “It’s nice. We’ve got some guys banged up, need some rest. Can give ‘Kuemps’ a couple of days off and heal up. We’ve got some guys with some stuff, like every other team, so we’ll take advantage of it.”

If anyone was worried that MacKinnon might be uneasy about all the attention Makar is getting, even potentially supplanting MacKinnon as the team’s No. 1 star, nip that talk right in the bud.

“He might be the best player in the league right now,” MacKinnon said of Makar. “The way he dominates from the back end is amazing all season, but these playoffs he’s taken another step with his leadership in the room, being more vocal. And obviously on the ice, he’s so dominant. He might be one of the best D to ever play by the end of his career.”

The Avalanche now move on to attempt to exorcise their second-round demons — demons that multiplied and became more haunting after their complete collapse against the Vegas Golden Knights last year.

At this point, whether fair or not, even with their star-studded roster that includes MacKinnon, Mikko Rantanen, Gabriel Landeskog and Makar, and more, it is a major element of their team identity.

The “lost-in-the-second-round-three-times-in-a-row” Colorado-Avalanche.

“It didn’t really cross my mind until right now,” Makar said. “This is step one. The next step is two. So you take it game by game. The only thing you can control is yourself … We know we have the group of guys in that room to make a run.”

If they can get to the Western Conference finals, the questions will become more about the Cup-or-bust mantra than about the pressure of getting over the second-round hurdle.

Before putting the Predators series in the books…

The most intriguing thing about it was the underplayed flopping of roles for the Avalanche and Predators in four years, or five seasons, and how it illustrates the cycles that can play out in the NHL.

In 2017-18, the Avalanche was coming off the worst bang-for-the-buck season of the post-2005 cap era, getting 48 points in 2016-17 while scraping the cap ceiling. Plagued by the unsettled atmosphere in the wake of Patrick Roy’s sudden departure, that was so bad, it was hard to do.

So making the 2018 playoffs as the Western Conference’s second wildcard was both surprising and praiseworthy.

There, they faced the Central Division champions and conference No. 1 seed, the powerful … Nashville Predators.

The Predators won that series in six games and moved on.

The Avalanche’s young core, though, was coming into its own.

So here we were four years later, with the Avalanche winning the Central and claiming the conference’s top seed; and the Predators blowing their final regular-season game at Arizona to fall back to the second conference wild card.

And the way the cycles — upward and downward — and roster evolution work, perhaps this isn’t that surprising.

Only five Avalanche players remain who were in the lineup from that 2018 series against the Predators.

They are MacKinnon, Rantanen, Landeskog, Samuel Girard and J.T. Compher.

Also, Avalanche defenseman Erik Johnson, even then a seasoned veteran, was injured late in the regular season and didn’t play in the series.

The flip side: The Predators also suited up five players in the 2022 series who went against the Avalanche in 2018.

They were Filip Forsberg, Ryan Johansen, Colton Sissons. Mattias Ekholm and Roman Josi.

A sixth holdover, much-missed goalie Juuse Saros, missed the series with a lower-body injury.

Terry Frei (terry@terryfrei.com, @tfrei) is a Denver-based author and journalist. He has been named a state’s sportswriter 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