Avalanche pull off impressive character win with shutout in Vegas

There’s nothing in the NHL quite like when two teams meet up in the regular season after a contentious playoff series. Players, coaches, fans, front office people, everyone feels the little extra juice involved in running it back against a team you just went to war with in the last run of the postseason gauntlet.

Last year’s Colorado-Vegas series was not your ordinary second-round series, either. It featured the two teams that finished atop the league’s standings who were a mile better than the competition in their lackluster division. It was highly anticipated most of the year and if you aren’t an Avalanche fan, the series delivered on its promise.

If you are an Avalanche fan, and chances are pretty high that if you’re reading this you are, it was a bitter pill to swallow. Every conversation about how good the Avs may or may not be in the future revolved around “but Vegas.”

Well the Avs walked into Vegas tonight having played the Dallas Stars in Denver last night while the Golden Knights sat at home and watched. It was the debut of superstar center Jack Eichel, who was acquired earlier this year in a blockbuster deal with the Buffalo Sabres and had controversial neck surgery.

Eichel’s first game back in action and his first game for his new team was the talk of the NHL. Here was the guy who was going to solve the long-running Vegas problem of having a true first-line center, the man in the middle that had been missing from previous iterations of the Golden Knights. Jack Eichel was the answer.

Nathan MacKinnon was Eichel’s first test. It’s a pretty brutal way to welcome back your star center to the NHL but Vegas has never been shy about wanting to compete and setting that tone.

It’s unfortunate for the Golden Knights that Eichel, whose pouty-face pressers in Buffalo became the stuff of hilarious internet memes, didn’t seem to get the message that simply showing up as he did with the Sabres was not going to be good enough.

The Vegas culture has been built on hard work and a staunch dedication to the game’s details. Both were missing from Eichel’s debut as MacKinnon and his linemates absolutely annihilated him in their head-to-head matchup.

While the Vegas depth had the better run of play against Colorado’s depth, the Avalanche top six did not struggle with the best the Golden Knights had to offer. Granted, Vegas was missing star winger Mark Stone, whose season-long back issues got just bad enough for the Golden Knights to put him on LTIR, taking Eichel’s place and keeping Vegas from having to trade away a high-salary player to be cap compliant upon Eichel’s activation.

Stone’s two-way brilliance certainly was missed in this game as it was MacKinnon’s line that did all of the damage a hard-fought 2-0 Avalanche victory.

Gabe Landeskog got the game’s first goal just 41 seconds into the third period, breaking a 0-0 tie that seemed at times like it might never end. Each goaltender, Laurent Brossoit for Vegas and Darcy Kuemper for Colorado, met the moment with a brilliant performance.

Landeskog’s one-timer off a brilliant play from Cale Makar was stunning in that it seemed to come from nowhere but really drove home what a game Colorado’s captain was having.

The truth is that Gabe Landeskog’s excellence this season deserves a deep-dive column of its own at some point as he continues to be overshadowed by the gaudy point totals of those around him but he’s the heart and soul of what makes this Avalanche team tick and we saw it again tonight.

Really, we’ve seen it all year, from the start of the season when he was running around fighting anyone who wanted to challenge the Avalanche physically. Once the message was sent that this year’s club was not going to be bullied as it had in the past, Landeskog continued holding everyone around the organization accountable: bring your best every day or get the hell out. No passengers.

With that in mind, Landeskog ripping home the game’s first goal after he had taken a huge hit right at the end of the second period felt appropriate. If Landeskog was going to hold his teammates to a standard, it had to start with himself.

It did.

Landeskog later drew a penalty when he chipped a puck past Alex Pietrangelo and had created a two-on-one opportunity the other way. Pietrangelo decided to take his chances against Colorado’s PP instead of the odd-man rush.

A great passing play resulted in Mikko Rantanen making it 2-0 at 15:45 of the third period, effectively icing the game on the man advantage Landeskog had put the Avalanche on.

While Captain Colorado was getting it done in front of him, Kuemper knew this was the game he was acquired to win. Maybe not this game, but you know what I mean. “But Vegas”, remember?

Kuemper was spectacular, making 29 saves and gobbling up any pucks that got near him. The shutout was Kuemper’s third of the season and was the third in his last four road starts. His shutout wins at Arizona, Dallas, and tonight at Vegas all surrounded one of the few games the Avs legitimately stole this year when Kuemper made 40 saves on 41 shots in the team’s win at the Los Angeles Kings.

Since Jan 1, Kuemper has posted a .936 save percentage and has climbed into the top 10 among starting goaltenders. It took him a bit to find his groove, but this was the player the Avalanche envisioned when they made the blockbuster trade for him last July.

The Avalanche met the moment.

Now, it was just the 48th game of the year and meeting the moment on February 17th isn’t nearly the same as doing it during the Stanley Cup Playoffs, but this continues to be a club that makes you believe it just might have something special in them.

TAKEAWAYS

• This seems pretty crazy to me but Colorado moved to 12-0-4 on the second night of back-to-backs in the last two seasons. Zero regulation losses? That speaks to the character and competitiveness of this core. Impressive.
• MacKinnon vs Eichel Round 1 was completely one-sided. At 5v5, MacKinnon was 12 CF, 1 CA in the head-to-head matchup. That’s an ass-kicking.
• Not to make too much of it, but I’m putting the spotlight on Colorado’s iffy bottom-six forward group tonight. J.T. Compher’s 5 CF/22 CA is unfathomably bad and cannot continue. Alex Newhook was the only depth guy to not get absolutely obliterated. That was where the Golden Knights had too much of their success.
• I’ll be very curious to see if the league gives Nathan MacKinnon a call for his headshot on Nolan Patrick in the first period. MacKinnon was penalized and Patrick didn’t return. Had Patrick been okay, I would have thought not much of the hit (it didn’t look particularly predatory or anything, just a dumb play by MacKinnon) but the league likes to penalize when an injury occurs (though not always, as we’ve seen…) so my radar is up a little more about this. I have absolutely no feel for the Department of Player Safety anymore so I’m not trying to predict the future on this.
• There were some moments with the puck that left you a little on edge but the physicality of this game makes it easy to see where the coaching staff is going to like what Jack Johnson brings to the table in a best-of-seven. He’s going to be a miserable sonuvagun to play against every night.
• Colorado is up to 74 points on the season. All the other top teams are starting to slow ever so slightly, but the Avs keep winning games. Their dominance out west is actually getting ridiculous as they are up to an 11-point lead on Minnesota and a 12-point lead on Calgary for the top seed in the conference. In case anyone was curious, the Avs now have a 15-point cushion on Vegas just as the Golden Knights lost Stone and starting goaltender Robin Lehner to injury. The lead on Florida for the President’s Trophy is now at three points. The east remains a fascinating race at the top.