Avalanche complete stunning comeback in overtime win over Sharks

I wrote about what an odd game it was two nights ago in their 4-3 win against the San Jose Sharks and how it was defined by so many things you just don’t see very often in a single game.

Tonight was headed for loss by the Avs to those same Sharks and was also weird but for very different reasons. Colorado started the first period slowly and gave up a 1-0 goal on a series of very sloppy puck miscues by Val Nichushkin.

The Avs got to work immediately after that and tied the game on a Mikko Rantanen goal, his 29th of the season. Colorado’s top line was dominating and the Avs were handling the Sharks by the end of the first period with a 13-5 shot advantage. It looked like the Avs were cruising.

Despite the second period being their personal playground this season, Colorado completely collapsed in it tonight with an extremely uncharacteristic showing. Awful puck management was the name of the game and questionable goaltending by Philipp Grubauer didn’t help Colorado’s cause as they got outshot 13-2 with the Sharks scoring two goals much like their first: directly off Colorado turnovers.

Colorado’s sloppy play was the defining characteristic in this game as they randomly got caved in during the second period by a Sharks team with essentially nothing left to play for this season.

It was a frustrating continuation of poor play on the road by the Avalanche as their dominance at home has not translated away from Ball Arena as much this year as it did last season.

There were plenty of issues in this game but the biggest was puck management. Simply not taking care of the puck in the manner in which we’re accustomed to the seeing from the Avs gave the Sharks the quality scoring chances they lacked across the two games back in Denver.

Enter Grubauer, who was playing in just his second game in the last month. You’d have thought his two results would have been swapped because his first game back was a clean shutout where he wasn’t tested very much but tonight when he was tested he struggled to stop the puck.

That isn’t to say Grubauer is solely at fault, of course, because he absolutely wasn’t. Breakaways and guys in alone in front of the net are major breakdowns by the players in front of him. What we haven’t seen too much of from Grubauer this year is him not being able to make the big stop to cover up for the mistakes.

Grubauer has been Colorado’s rock and tonight we got a look at just how vulnerable the Avalanche are when he’s not on top of his game.

The other point of contention was Colorado’s inability to come back in a game. Entering the third period down 3-1, Colorado scored immediately to make it 3-2 and give them some life.

Just minutes later, however, Timo Meier wired a bullet past Grubauer and it was 4-2. Game over, turn the lights out, the Avs are finished.

And then they weren’t.

The team that was 0-8-0 on the season when entering the third period trailing was also the only team in the NHL to not get a single point from that situation. It has been a talking point around the Avalanche as they are so good in so many facets of the game but not this one.

And goals by Gabe Landeskog and Nazem Kadri, his first in 20 games, got the Avalanche into overtime. Grubauer’s play shored up and Colorado managed the puck like it normally does and the ice tilted once again.

Once in overtime, Colorado won the opening faceoff and never gave up possession as Andre Burakovsky hopped off the bench and walked in alone as three Sharks players waited for each other to do something about it and Burakovsky got one through Martin Jones, who totally fell apart in the third period and then got a piece of a shot he should have had in overtime.

The puck caught the glove of Jones and trickled across the line and the Avalanche won 5-4 in overtime. A stunning turn of events.

Just like that, Colorado has answered their first three-game losing streak of the season by now winning three in a row. Their season series record against the Sharks moves to 6-1 as they play each other for the final time this year on Wednesday.

We know for sure it will be the final time because San Jose’s extremely slim playoff hopes were extinguished by Colorado’s comeback and the team that eliminated the Avs in Game 7 of the second round two years ago was kicked to the curb by the Avalanche tonight.

TAKEAWAYS

• As good as Colorado has been in the regular season the last two years, it stuns me that in five years under Jared Bednar the Avalanche have only managed to win 11 games when entering the third period trailing. They move to 1-8-0 this year and 11-108-15 in Bednar’s tenure in that situation. I don’t understand it. It isn’t a systems thing. It isn’t a messaging thing. It feels completely random but I suppose there could be something about coaching that impacts it? It certainly doesn’t help that Colorado has been so bad in overtime the last few years. If they were better at 3v3, maybe some of those 15 OTLs would have turned into wins. I don’t really know what to make of it. Reality is the Avs got their first of this year tonight and it kept them in the driver’s seat in the West Division.
• Vegas had a shocking late-game meltdown to Minnesota tonight as the Wild scored twice in the final two minutes to win in regulation. Their win temporarily moved them into a tie with the Avs until Colorado completed a comeback of their own. Now, the Avs sit two points ahead of the Wild with a game in hand and are now just two behind Vegas with both a game in hand and a head-to-head matchup looming next Monday. As Colorado owns the first tiebreaker against the Golden Knights (Regulation Wins), the Avs only need to tie the Golden Knights to secure their first division title since 2013-14.
• I genuinely don’t know what to make of tonight. The Avs shots on goal by period: 13, 2, 15, 1. Somehow they nearly had as many shots in overtime, which lasted just 41 seconds, as the entire second period. The numbers are staggering across the board but the one that jumped out to me the most was the high-danger chances. Colorado allowed just four of them at 5v5 across the two games back in Denver. Tonight, they allowed 10, eight of them coming in the second period. Scoring chances? San Jose had an 18-5 advantage in period two with the Avs having a 27-8 advantage in periods one and three. Just what the hell happened in the second period tonight??
• Maybe the most important development of the night outside of the win was Kadri getting a goal. 20 games is not a normal amount of time for a player of his caliber to go without scoring. It was a huge one as he took a flubbed Brent Burns clearing attempt, walked around Burns and then scored from an impossible angle on Jones. It was huge for the Avs and huge for him. He is absolutely critical to Colorado’s hopes of going deep into the postseason. If he no-shows, life is going to get a lot harder for the Avs. One area Kadri has excelled this year even when he hasn’t been scoring goals: drawing penalties. He leads the Avs with 26 drawn penalties. While he also leads with 17 penalties taken, he’s on the positive side of that equation by quite a bit.
• It was great to see the Nichushkin-Jost-Burakovsky line get a goal. Colorado’s top line has been so damn good that Colorado can hide the disappearances of its depth sometimes but that combination getting on the board is also critical. Getting goals from three different lines while maintaining one of the league’s most dominant top lines is a great formula for winning.
• Im just not sure how much more leash Jared Bednar can give Patrik Nemeth. He’s badly struggled since getting back to Colorado. Bednar keeps talking about “rust” when it comes to Nemo but this is starting to get beyond that. Some truly awful play with the puck tonight that very nearly cost them two points.
• I was hard on Grubauer above but he also made a couple of huge saves in the second period that kept the game from getting to 4-1. Emotionally, I think that was very important in helping create the conditions for a successful comeback.
• Might get lost in the shuffle but Joonas Donskoi backchecking on Evander Kane right in front of Grubauer with about 90 seconds left in regulation was enormous. From an incredible scoring chance to not even a shot attempt, Donskoi’s defensive play was the key in helping the Avs get into overtime in the first place.