Avs searching for answers after blowout loss to Wild

9-6-1 through 16 games? Stanley Cup contender? Are we sure?

Following an embarrassing 6-2 loss on home ice to the Minnesota Wild, the Avs fell to sixth place in the West Division. The loss was the first time the Avs have lost two straight games this season.

Nathan MacKinnon was scoreless for the second straight game and third time in his last five games. Philipp Grubauer gave up a season-high five goals.

Everything in Avs land is bad, right?

It’s not the best, that’s for sure. It’s of little surprise their captain has a more optimistic take on it than the people of the internet.

“A little bit of adversity, I think, is good for us as a group and it’s going to be good for us long term,” Gabe Landeskog said after the game. “Good teams find a way to turn things around pretty quickly and I have no doubt we’ll do that.”

Using words like ‘adversity’ and talking about the long-term positive effects of the team’s first losing streak, you’d think the Avalanche were buried in a hole, mired in a deep slump, but they aren’t. They’ve lost two in a row but are 6-3-1 in their last 10.

The offense is struggling to score, having scored more than three goals just three times in the first 16 games. Tonight, however, they felt like they put in the work, whereas previous nights they certainly didn’t.

“We created enough scoring chances to score plenty of goals,” Landeskog said. “As a group, we’re a little bit snake-bitten right now and we have to find our way through that.”

Looking through the team’s numbers, there’s no doubt the Avalanche have been on the wrong end of some poor puck luck as the on-ice shooting percentages for the entire Avalanche bottom-six forwards are comically low.

Some went up tonight when J.T. Compher scored his second of the season but it wasn’t enough. They need to all be pulling the rope in the same direction, largely by repeating at least the effort portion of tonight’s game. It’s the execution that needs the real work.

“[Fighting through being snake-bitten] is by doing what we did tonight,” Landeskog said. “I thought we were putting lots of pucks at the net and we were trying every single ways to create scoring chances, whether that was low or high in the zone or off the rush, whatever. Like I said, our group is a little snake-bitten and we’ll work through it.”

The Avs don’t see Vegas or St. Louis for a full month. If they’re going to get the full offense going, now is the time to make it happen.

TAKEAWAYS 

• Nazem Kadri is a wild ride this year. He looked like he had real jump early in the game and he kept it up throughout but there were some real pros and cons along the way. The little pass he made back to Conor Timmins to spring Minnesota for their first goal was poorly executed and put Timmins in a bad spot. No surprise, a bad spot turned into a bad result. Not entirely Kadri’s fault, of course, especially with the way that goal finished, but he played his part. The power-play goal in the third was important for plenty of game reasons but it gave the Avs their first PPG in quite a while. How that goal happened is why I’m interested in it. They can use that bumper slot for a lot more than they ever have before with a player like Kadri. I’m not particularly hopeful this is a change that will actively happen but it shows a wrinkle Colorado should be trying to add to their game.
• Speaking of wild rides, rookie defensemen always bring certain levels of chaos. Both Byram and Timmins have played to the extremes, though we haven’t really seen any major steps forward from Timmins. I won’t say Byram is going backward but he’s definitely feeling through the process of being an NHL regular right now. He’s making a lot of mistakes alongside making some really nice plays so it’s not time to start worrying or anything like that. It’s just the nature of rookie defenders in the NHL. The game is faster and tighter than at any other level they’ve experienced and the mistakes they make get magnified into goals that translate into losses. Everything matters more and both of these young defensemen are learning the hard way that they have to be at the top of their game to find the success in the NHL they’ve been accustomed to all their lives.
• A great example of why you give guys time to work through their issues? Ryan Graves. He had such a rough start to the season and now he’s starting to string together some quality games, this one included. You can argue he was even Colorado’s best player tonight, which is both an indictment of the poor play of his team and a compliment to a player who had a strong night. As Toews and Makar continue adjusting to life together and Girard keeps humming along as his normal great all-around self, the Avs need Graves as a stabilizing force as Timmins and Byram go through their growing pains. The Graves we saw tonight is much more of the guy we saw last year that got the three-year contract than the one we’ve seen this year that made it look so questionable. We’ve all been so focused on the sprint that is this regular season that I certainly lost sight of the idea that some players might just be slow starters. We saw it for years with Nikita Zadorov and now Ryan Graves basically got a free month to find his game. It appears he’s found it.
• On the opposite side, you don’t want to worry too much about Philipp Grubauer because he’s been so good this year but this is the type of performance that makes you wonder if he’s already feeling the effects of not having a reliable backup to give him the occasional night off. After an elite stretch of games, he’s now had two games in a row where he’s come back to earth a little bit. Certainly the defense in front of him didn’t do him a ton of favors but you also can’t help but feel like he wasn’t close to his best self tonight.