Ryan Boulding
All in all, is it just another crack in the wall or has it been a total eclipse on their part?
These are the song-influenced questions that keep me up late at night after the high-energy, decibel demolishing hockey games at Ball Arena lately.
But seriously, what if this Colorado Avalanche team is not like the others of the last three years? Or what if they’re the pretenders again?
There are certainly a lot of question marks as this 2021-22 iteration of the burgundy and blue closes out the regular-season slate and begins—finally!—preparing for the postseason and all the winning and losing and triumph and suffering that comes with it.
Another quest for Lord Stanley’s sweet silver chalice is upon us, but this tumble down the hill, this dip as Avs head coach Jared Bednar calls it, is potentially a cause for concern.
You can argue, and you’d be right, that an 82-game campaign is too long these days. Following two COVID-shortened seasons, a full NHL schedule seems like an eternity of contests, particularly when compressed toward the end. However, there will never be a reduced schedule, certainly not when the NFL has added a game.
While most players won’t admit that weariness could come into play here at the end of the semi-meaningful matches, there is some truth to the idea that the Avalanche losing five of their last six games could be due to mental fatigue as much as anything else.
“We’ve tried to give our guys a lot of rest. As you see, we’re not here a lot on off days just because of the schedule and the travel,” Bednar said this week when asked about the fatigue factor. “It’s been a long year mentally though. You notice it even as coaches. You get a couple short ones, and all of the sudden here we’re adding two months to it. So now it’s starting to drag, which it’s human nature. I understand a little bit. My level of concern with that is low, but now I want to see us go, at least in areas that we talked about.”
The Avs surged following that conversation, taking it to the St. Louis Blues for what Erik Johnson described as an awesome 52 minutes, but the team was back in the losing column two days later after Matt Duchene and the Nashville Predators gave a glimpse of what the first round of the playoffs could look like.
For an honest Joe like Cale Makar, it perhaps seems obvious reading between the lines that a month full of meaningless hockey has dragged on and become monotonous to the squad of some of the NHL’s best.
“We’ve definitely been ready for playoffs for the past weeks, that’s for sure,” he said on Thursday. “Obviously, it’s right there in front of us. We have to be ready and we’ve been on a little bit of a not-so-hot streak here, but at the same time I still think the confidence in the group is very high and we know what we’re capable of. It’s just putting all those pieces together. We’re definitely really excited for playoffs.”
They want a challenge.
The trouble with that idea is that they’ve been given some challenges lately and, despite some roster origami designed to give guys some rest, they’ve largely been mediocre. Games that mattered to the Washington Capitals, Edmonton Oilers, and Nashville Predators resulted in confusing losses for Colorado. Even winnable matches against the Seattle Kraken and Winnipeg Jets saw unfavorable finishes.
Tuesday’s victory against the Blues provided a glimmer of the once-unstoppable form that solidified the Avalanche as the top team in the west, but that was once in the last six games.
Is losing any of those contests really a cause for concern? No.
But losing most of them, including to the Predators in the shootout, is certainly a trend nobody wants to be seeing at this point in time. You can think the focus isn’t there. You can justify it because only what comes next is what matters. You can believe that this previously dominant club is prepared to steamroll its way through the competition next week.
But you can also see those cracks in the sturdy Avs facade forming when, of all the people, goaltender Darcy Kuemper is being singled out as a weak point all of the sudden.
“I would say the difference in the hockey game, to be fair, was Kuemps had an off night,” Bednar said to a somewhat surprised media contingent at Ball Arena on Thursday.
This type of call-out isn’t commonplace as of late. Perhaps it belies the high standard that has been set internally, once which the team has fallen short of lately. But it certainly is worth noting.
“The difference is Kemps didn’t have a great night. It can happen. Rather it happen now than in the playoffs,” Bednar said before addressing whether his confidence in the backstop had changed. “One bad night. He played tonight like our team played in Winnipeg. It can happen.”
Unfortunately, recent history has proven that once an invincible Avalanche goalie loses confidence in himself, it’s something that’s hard to regain.
Still, the players have Kuemper’s back.
“He’s been the rock for us all year. We have tons of confidence in his game,” Logan O’Connor said. “We could have been better for him tonight in front of him. We let some opportunities slip away that we could have helped him out on more, but throughout the whole season he’s been there for us, been the backbone of our team helping us win games that we maybe shouldn’t win. He’s kept us in a lot of games throughout the year. So we have tons of confidence with him.”
Added Makar: “He’s been a rock for us and we have the utmost confidence in him going into playoffs, that’s for sure.”
We won’t know until the puck drops in Game 1 Tuesday against Nashville, and I personally ain’t too concerned about where the Avs are currently, but this dip is something to keep in the back of your mind.