Terry Frei
Nathan MacKinnon likely volunteered for the duty to be one of the two players dispatched to the interview room at Ball Arena Thursday night.
He strode to the table and microphone with an agenda.
His message (and this is paraphrasing): The Avalanche might have played a stinker in their 4-1 loss to the Blues in Game 2, but, hey, there’s no cause for panic.
That makes perfect sense.
The series is tied.
The Avalanche don’t trail 1-1.
The public, media and even in-house overreaction to single playoff games is an entrenched NHL tradition.
After every win for the locals, it’s “Plan the Parade, Mr. (or Ms.) Mayor.”
After every loss, it’s “Paging Dr. Heimlich…”
Momentum is a see-saw.
That’s exaggeration. Consider it a caricature.
But in all my years of covering the NHL and Colorado franchises, I’ve become accustomed to those 180-degree swings of emotion and attitude in at least the competitive series.
Remember, MacKinnon ruffled some feathers going into the playoffs when he said (paraphrasing again) if the Avs lost Game 1 against Nashville, there’d always be Game 2 and the road to the Stanley Cup is a body of work, not single games.
He was absolutely right.
But what seemed perplexing Thursday was his acknowledgement: “We didn’t have our jump tonight. Our execution was off. Yeah, just weren’t feeling it. Just fighting it out there. It’s unfortunate, but it’s 1-1 and we get to go on the road and hopefully steal one there. Hopefully two. We have to forget about it, move on.”
Granted, some nights you just lose.
Especially once the NHL gets down to its Elite 8 — and that’s what the conference semifinals are — every opponent is a threat.
Perhaps even after covering playoff hockey for decades, I’m not giving enough credit to the inevitable ups and downs involved in the relentless mental and physical rigors of the race for 16 playoff wins. After the sweep of Nashville and the split of the first two games against the Blues, Colorado is 5-1 in the 2022 postseason.
But how can you not have “jump” for a playoff game?
I mean, how can that be?
Maybe you can have “effort” minus “jump,” but I don’t think so.
I asked McKinnon why they didn’t have it.
“I don’t know,” MacKinnon said. “It happens. We were trying our best, did everything we could, just off, just really off tonight.”
Mackinnon and Mikko Rantanen had assists on the Gabriel Landeskog third-period goal that got the Avalanche to within 2-1, but the Blues added David Perron’s second goal of the game and Brandon Saad’s empty netter.
I also asked Jared Bednar if that lack of “jump” perplexed him.
“I didn’t like it,” he said. “It happens. Especially early on, our biggest issue was no one wanted to skate with the puck. Last game, every time we touched the puck, we were moving and skating on our first touch. Tonight, we weren’t, so you don’t get time for the play to develop up the ice, let our forwards get to where they want to go before we’re giving it to them. [The Blues] did a nice job in the neutral zone, but we didn’t move. We made the job easy on them.”
In the Avs’ two Stanley Cup championship seasons, they were 16-6 in the 1996 playoffs and 16-7 in 2001.
“We still believe we can get this thing done, win the series,” MacKinnon said. “We’re not going to sweep every round. It’s fine.”
The Avalanche will win this series. The stars, mostly dormant in the first two games, will awaken.
But they can’t forget the jump.
Terry Frei ([email protected], @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 website 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