The Stanley Cup Playoffs are here.

The Colorado Avalanche, winner of the President’s Trophy as the league’s top regular-season team, opens up their first-round matchup tomorrow night against the St. Louis Blues.

Despite the Avs going 5-3 against the Blues in their eight matchups throughout the season, many are nervous about the possible matchup problems presented by the Blues as they finally got healthy down the stretch and Jordan Binnington started to regain the form we saw two years ago.

So how do the two teams really match up against each other?

That’s what I’m here to try to find out. Before getting into specifics, let’s look at the teams on the whole.

Colorado vs. St. Louis – Fancy Stats and Heat Maps

I want to start with the fancy stuff up top before digging into the specifics of lines.

Just in terms of the process that these teams played to on the ice, I think many will be surprised by the numbers here. All numbers here are pulled from Natural Stat Trick and are 5v5.

Colorado:
CF: 58.98% (1st)
SF: 58.31% (1st)
GF: 59.82% (1st)
xGF: 60.08% (1st)
SCF: 60.43% (1st)
HDCF: 58.75% (1st)
SH: 8.87% (8th)
SV: 91.67% (16th)

St. Louis
CF: 47.71% (24th)
SF: 48.82 (17th)
GF: 48.34% (19th)
xGF: 46.09% (25th)
SCF: 48.02% (20th)
HDCF: 43.89% (30th)
SH: 8.23% (14th)
SV: 91.62% (18th)

In heat map form, it looks like this:

Okay, so what does all of this mean?

It means at 5v5:
-Colorado’s offense is very good
-St. Louis’s offense is bad
-Colorado’s defense is elite
-St. Louis’s defense is good

On the PP:
-Colorado is very good
-St. Louis is good

On the PK:
-Colorado is good
-St. Louis is very bad

In the head-to-head matchup, we see those underlying numbers align pretty closely with what actually happened.

Across the eight games the Avs and Blues played against each other, here’s how the results shook out:

-St. Louis outscored Colorado 14-12 at 5v5 with 10 of those goals coming in the first, seventh, and eighth matchups. In those three games, the Avs scored just one 5v5 goal. It is no surprise those were the three games the Blues won this year.

-In the special teams battle, the Avalanche dominated. Colorado outscored the Blues 13-6 on the power play. Even if you remove the 8-0 demolition in the second game of the season that saw the Avs score five PP goals, the Avs still won 8-6. Maybe just as important was that Colorado scored on the PP in seven of the eight games while the Blues scored in five of them.

The St. Louis Injury Caveat

Moving away from their head-to-head matchup, there’s the big caveat here of the injury issue. I can already hear the one Blues fan who will read this saying, “But AJ, the Blues suffered a ton of injuries and didn’t start playing well until April 1st.”

Glad you brought it up!

Let’s look at just how good the Blues have actually been in that time.

First off, the record.

St. Louis: 11-7-3
Colorado: 16-5-1

At 5v5, these are their underlying results:

CF%: COL 1st STL 26th
GF%: COL 4th STL 15th
xGF%: COL 1st STL 30th
SH%: COL 16th STL 8th
SV%: COL 13th STL 5th
PP%: COL 9th STL 2nd
PK%: COL 25th STL 13th

Definitely some areas of concern for the Avalanche as their shooting dried up a little and their penalty kill really struggled. On the flip side, the Blues crushed it on special teams as their power play found its best form of the season and while its penalty kill wasn’t special, it was certainly a big leap forward for a team that finished 25th across the entire season in PK%.

Ultimately, however, you look at those records and you see that the Blues still weren’t anything special across the cherry-picked timeframe in which they supposedly were the “real” Blues.

Also, on the point of injuries, I would like to add that life is hard and while the Blues absolutely suffered their fair share of bad luck on the injury front, people in Colorado simply do not want to hear it.

There is no doubt injuries played a factor in the Blues struggling the way they did this season, but looking at the issues the Avalanche also had, it’s not particularly meaningful.

What will be meaningful is the uncertain status of Vladimir Tarasenko, Vince Dunn, and David Perron going into Game 1. All of them face different circumstances and are questionable for the series opener.

On Colorado’s side, they are actually heading the opposite direction as they appear to be getting healthier. Brandon Saad and Nathan MacKinnon are both expected to play after each missed a portion of the last two weeks of the season. Conor Timmins, who did not play in the third period of the season finale against the Kings, is also practicing in a full-contact jersey and appears ready to go.

While he is practicing and could make his return to the lineup at some point in the series, it does not appear Game 1 is when the Avalanche will see Bowen Byram get back into action. He was practicing next to Jacob MacDonald on Sunday as they compromised Colorado’s fourth pair on defense.

Ryan O’Reilly vs. Nathan MacKinnon

I was originally going to get into all of the lines against each other but the last-minute uncertainties with the Blues lineup made that a futile effort, especially with Perron’s status in jeopardy as he’s a huge part of their top line.

Instead, let’s just focus on what will be the crux of the series anyway.

The head-to-head matchup of O’Reilly and MacKinnon will likely go a long way to determining the winner of the series.

Before getting into the details of their specific matchup, first we’ll just look at what each player did in the season series.

MacKinnon: 8 GP, 6G/8A/14 Pts
O’Reilly: 8 GP, 4G/3A/7 Pts

On the surface, it looks like MacKinnon pretty thoroughly handled the matchup. Adding some context, however, we get a clearer look at things.

Six of O’Reilly’s seven points came in the last two matchups between the teams with the Avs coming back from their second COVID pause and he registered just a single goal in their first six games.

On the opposite side, the only game in which MacKinnon failed to record a point was the first game of the season back on January 13. He also had four multi-point games, three of which were three-point games.

Again, on the surface, it looks like MacKinnon absolutely dominated the matchup. As we get into their head-to-head fancy stats, he did.

MacKinnon vs. O’Reilly head-to-head at 5v5

• CF%: 64.66
• SF%: 59.70
• GF%: 42.86
• xGF%: 67.66
• SCF%: 71.15
• HDCF%: 78.95

Obviously, the only pockmark here is the goals scored as O’Reilly had a 4-3 advantage. The rest show an absolute dominance from MacKinnon in shot share.

Actual results matter, of course, but all four of those 5v5 goals in O’Reilly’s favor were scored in their last two contests which did not have Mikko Rantanen (kind of a big part of Colorado’s top line) and, maybe more importantly, had Devan Dubnyk in net instead of Philipp Grubauer.

Barring injury (touch wood), O’Reilly won’t have an opportunity to feast on Dubnyk’s mediocrity and pad the one stat that went in his favor against MacKinnon this season.

Going into this playoff series, it appears the Avalanche have a potentially significant advantage with MacKinnon, despite the Selke and Conn Smythe hardware earned by O’Reilly in his career.

Whoever wins this battle will go a long way to getting their team to the second round.

Battle of the wild cards

Every postseason series features a best-on-best matchup that is primarily responsible for getting the series to its ultimate conclusion but right behind that is the wild cards, the non-star players who have a chance to tilt a series if a player gets hot.

Now, goaltending is an obvious candidate here but because I’m considering the goaltending battle an entirely separate war, I wanted to look elsewhere to see if there were any guys who really jumped off the ice.

There are some great candidates in this series as the youngbloods on Colorado’s side like Alex Newhook, Conor Timmins and maybe even Bowen Byram all present tantalizing options for guys who could flip a series on its head.

Over on St. Louis, they have a talented scorer in Sammy Blais who has some real finishing ability and if he gets loose he can make NHL goaltenders look bad. Mike Hoffman is basically a power play specialist at this point because he’s an awful defensive player but he’s a major reason the Blues power play finished as strongly as it did.

Lots of good players in this conversation but I think there are three that really stick out to me.

Devon Toews

The last two years, Colorado has had the services of Cale Makar and Sam Girard and we’ve seen what they can do. Both players have elevated their games even further this year and will be a primary source of attention from the Blues.

Where we’ve seen some struggles from the Avalanche is beyond those guys. Erik Johnson’s injury early in the Dallas series last year changed Colorado’s fortunes quite a bit. They lost one of their primary penalty kill players and a secondary puck mover who could break the puck out of their own zone both with his legs and via pass.

Enter Toews, who has been one of the offseason’s best pickups in the entire league. Toews was an obvious fit from day one and the fact that he produced a CF% over 60 with three different partners this year is absurd (Makar, Girard, Timmins) and a testament to his versatility on Colorado’s defense.

Toews quietly recorded 31 points this year, a career-high despite playing just 53 games, and was a member of both the power play and penalty kill. The ability from Toews to mix and match with any partner depending on the situation is one of Jared Bednar’s biggest aces in the hole.

He had a very tough finish in the playoffs last year as he badly struggled in the Islanders’ Conference Finals loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning. He’s far too important to the success of the Avalanche this year for him to repeat that performance and, at least in my eyes, he is the linchpin to Colorado’s defense continuing its excellence from the regular season.

Robert Thomas/Jordan Kyrou

This is kind of cheating because I’m choosing two players but these guys are the biggest reason I think the Blues will have a chance in this series. If Perron is out for any of the series, it really only enhances the importance of these two.

The co-faces of their youth movement, Thomas and Kyrou are two of the young players the Blues have actually chosen not to move out for immediate veteran upgrades and have waited and waited for their respective breakouts.

Kyrou managed to stay healthy and had himself a very strong year with 35 points (14g, 21a) in 55 games. Thomas, on the other hand, struggled with injuries as he suffered an injured thumb and played in just 33 games, scoring 12 points (3g, 9a).

The numbers aren’t overwhelming but they’ve been playing together quite a bit and have the ability to change games with their dynamic playmaking. The Blues are a team that beats you with quality depth, coming in waves until they wear you down and force mistakes they can counterattack on.

With Thomas and Kyrou, however, they have two players who possess the ability to create something out of nothing via raw skill, not just outworking the opponent.

If these guys catch fire at any point during the series, Colorado’s job gets significantly harder.

Just get to the goalies, AJ

Okay, okay, okay. We’re here.

Philipp Grubauer versus Jordan Binnington is going to be huge. Grubauer is vying for the big payday in the offseason and needs to show his strong regular season play can translate.

Honestly, his entire Colorado career he has been very good in the postseason. The only problem was the injury he suffered in Game 1 against Dallas. When healthy, Grubauer has not been an issue in the playoffs.

In fact, he’s 12-6 with a .924 save percentage and 2.15 goals against average with 12 of 19 starts qualifying as “quality starts.” If he just keeps humming along at that level, the Avs will be in fantastic shape. If he keeps humming along at the level of this regular season, where he could finish in the top five of the Vezina Trophy voting, the Avs will be in fantastic shape.

In short, the Avalanche don’t need Grubauer to do anything more than what he’s been doing. Just stay healthy and play to the level he has most of the last two years and Colorado should find themselves in the driver’s seat.

On the other side, Binnington was rewarded with a shocking six-year contract halfway through this season where his up-and-down play since backstopping the Blues to the Stanley Cup two years ago has continued.

Unlike Grubauer, Binnington’s playoff performances with the Blues have been a tale of two completely different players. The one who led their surprising run to the Cup two years ago and the guy who went 0-5 with an .851 save percentage and 4.72 goals against average last season.

Those are disastrous numbers, albeit in a very small sample. Of course, when you play as poorly as Binnington did last year, of course the sample is small because you don’t get to stick around long enough to turn things around.

Turn things around is exactly what he did this regular season.

Binnington was 10-10-3 with a .903 save percentage through the end of March. If anyone’s play actually did take a leap at the start of April, it was actually Binnington’s. From that point, he went 8-4-3 with a .921 save percentage.

The record wasn’t great but his personal level of play was significantly better. If Binnington keeps up that run of form during the first round, the Blues will be a tough out. The Avs will have to pepper the Blues. If Binnington reverts back to the player he was the first three months of the season and last postseason, the Avs just might sweep this thing.

Final Thoughts

Given this is going live on the eve of Game 1, there is still a surprising amount of unknowns right now. The top question is the status of Perron and, to a lesser extent, Dunn and Tarasenko.

You might notice you’ve gotten 2,400 words into this piece and I haven’t mentioned “grit” of “physicality” at all. That’s long been the alleged bugaboo for the Avalanche and here’s how I see it: If the Blues come out flying and trying to hit everything, either the Avs handle it or they don’t. If they don’t, they’ll be playing golf in two weeks and will face an offseason of identity crisis questions.

If they do, it’ll likely be upward and onward for the Avalanche. They’re a potential powerhouse. In their heart of hearts, nobody wants to play these guys.

It’s no disrespect to the Blues to say that I think the Avalanche enter this series as heavy favorites. It’s on them to live up to that hype now. Welcome to the “championship or bust” world.