Deceiving final score masks closely-contested Game 2 Avalanche win

When the game is halfway over and you’re leading 3-0 and outshooting the opponent 26-10, you aren’t expecting the closest of finishes in that game but that’s exactly what the Colorado Avalanche got in their Game 2 tilt against the St. Louis Blues.

Continuing their raw domination of the Blues from Game 1, the Avs jumped on St. Louis and scored just 35 seconds into the game, eventually building a three-goal lead in the second period while dominating shots yet again.

It didn’t look that different from Colorado’s last two regular season games against the Los Angeles Kings, to be honest. Nathan MacKinnon had two points and Joonas Donskoi was already looking for a hat trick and the Avs appeared in total control on their way to a 2-0 series lead.

Then the Blues got to work, cranked up their forecheck, stopped playing Ryan O’Reilly head-to-head against MacKinnon and began to find their footing in the game.

O’Reilly’s line found success against Nazem Kadri and Tyson Jost after once again getting chewed up by the MacKinnon matchup. Once that line started to feel good about itself, the Blues fell in line and started forcing turnovers from Colorado’s back end, some from the predictable lot and some from guys you don’t expect to struggle as much there.

It was a Patrik Nemeth turnover, however, that sparked the first St. Louis goal and allowed the Blues to really sink their teeth into the game late in the second period.

Down just 3-1 entering the third period, the Blues didn’t really mount much of an attack in their attempted comeback. They were throwing pucks towards the Colorado net but nothing was particularly dangerous and Philipp Grubauer was mostly just gobbling up pucks like Cookie Monster and the Avs were fine.

Then Nazem Kadri smoked Justin Faulk in the head, knocking Faulk out and earning a major and match penalty.

That indiscretion will likely cost Kadri this weekend’s games in St. Louis but in the immediate it gave the Blues a five-minute power play to try to build a comeback. The Avs killed off the first 3:30 or so before Tyler Bozak banged home a rebound as the Blues entered the Colorado zone with a ton of speed.

That ended up being the only goal they would score on the man advantage as the Avs battened down the hatches and had a genuinely solid penalty kill on the whole. Coming off it, the Avs went back to work and the Avs caught the Blues in the O’Reilly-MacKinnon matchup and immediately scored, seemingly ending the game at 4-2.

That thought ended 15 seconds later as Mike Hoffman beat Grubauer with a bit of a soft short-side goal that Grubauer caught a piece of and probably should have stopped. He didn’t and it was once again a one-goal game late in the third period.

With an offensive zone faceoff, the Blues pulled Jordan Binnington for the extra attacker with 2:18 left in the game. P.E. Bellemare won the draw cleanly back to Devon Toews, who worked the puck around to Tyson Jost. The puck moved from there to Brandon Saad, who turned and fired the puck from just beyond center ice into the empty net. That made it 5-3 and effectively ended the game.

MacKinnon would get his third goal of the night into an empty net, securing the first playoff hat trick since April 24, 1997, when Valeri Kamensky did it.

The final score ended up 6-3 but for the majority of the third period, the game was a nail-biter from the Colorado side and a desperate comeback attempt from the St. Louis end.

In the end, all the work the Blues did to pushback fell just short and the Avalanche take a 2-0 series lead back to St. Louis for Game 3 on Friday night.

TAKEAWAYS

• After each team ran out the same basic lineups in Games 1 and 2, there’s potential for major changes coming to both sides in Game 3. The David Perron saga continues for now and whether or not he is taken off the league’s COVID Protocol List remains an ongoing question. The Blues will not get back Jake Walman regardless of his status on the Protocol List (he’s still there as of tonight) and that could become important as neither Robert Bortuzzo nor Justin Faulk finished the game. Faulk left after Kadri’s hit and Bortuzzo left after appearing to take an elbow up high from Tyson Jost. If those two miss Game 3, along with Walman’s continued absence and the uncertainty surrounding Vince Dunn, the Blues will have to dig deep into their reserves to find some help on the back end. Meanwhile, there’s a pretty good chance Kadri is suspended multiple games for the hit on Faulk. In my eyes, it’s a pretty indefensible hit from Kadri and the exact kind of headshot the league has spent years trying to get out of the game. Given Kadri’s history, it’s a disappointing turn for a player who has become a leader in Colorado’s locker room. It is absolutely not what Colorado needed just as it put the Blues on the ropes by winning the first two games of the series. All the best wishes to Faulk. His reaction on the ice was scary and concerning and you just hope this doesn’t become a long-term problem for him.
• From the hockey perspective, I continue being fascinated by the matchups in this series. The lack of Perron is showing up more on the Blues PP than anywhere else as Bozak has taken Perron’s spot on that unit and he absolutely knows he isn’t out there to bomb one-timers like a poor man’s Ovechkin. He’s a facilitator only as they try to get pucks through via Torey Krug or Mike Hoffman. It’s obvious that Hoffman is their bread-and-butter and their response to the Avs shading a player to spy on Hoffman was to try to utilize O’Reilly in the bumper spot in the middle of the ice more. O’Reilly had multiple looks but missed high and had a lot of Avalanche sticks in the lane on the opportunities. When they did move the puck back around to Hoffman, they couldn’t get anything going. The Blues PPG came off a broken assignment between Val Nichushkin and J.T. Compher and happened via transition, not the traditional PP setup. Interesting little wrinkles between these two teams.
• On the flip side, we saw Cale Makar score the first goal in Game 1 by feigning a pass to MacKinnon on the power play, which Bozak bit hard on and opened Makar’s shooting lane. Tonight, O’Reilly was shading hard towards Makar high in the zone and allowed MacKinnon to walk right in on Binnington. That forced Bortuzzo to step out to try to block the shot but MacKinnon whipped between his legs and found space on Binnington’s short side to score the goal.
• This was a spectacular failure by O’Reilly across both games. He got rocked by Gabe Landeskog on the first shift of the game that helped create the game’s opening goal, then watched MacKinnon score the goal above. After the Avs made it 3-0, Blues head coach Craig Berube had enough and started moving O’Reilly away to try to salvage his star center’s night. It didn’t happen as he got burned in the third period again and is a -6 through two games.
• Kind of an odd game for Grubauer. Two of the three goals were a little iffy but he made 32 saves on 35 shots and was stout throughout. The rebounds have been a little bouncy lately and we saw that again tonight as the first two goals were direct results of rebounds. That’s not placing sole blame of both goals on him, of course, because he has a team in front of him that’s allowed to swat at pucks, too, but a small trend worth noting in his play recently.