OTTAWA, Ontario – Just when I thought I had something figured out with this team, just when I dared to say this team had some momentum on which to build, just when I dared to predict that prosperity was just around the corner for this team again, the Colorado Avalanche went out and just stunk up the ice at the Canadian Tire Centre Wednesday night in their worst performance of the season.
We aren’t just back to Square One again with this team, folks. We’re at Less Than Zero. The Avs showed tonight that what happened the other night in Toronto was just an aberration, that overall they’re just not a very good hockey team right now. After a lazy, incompetent, shockingly brutal 5-2 loss to the last-place Ottawa Senators here, the Avs fell to 2-8-2 in the last 12 games.
Am I overreacting? I don’t know, maybe. But, wow, that was not what I expected to see tonight. Who is the lottery team, anyway?
The Senators, whose first-round pick this year Colorado owns, thoroughly dominated the Avs. Absolutely dominated them. To say the Avs were soft in this one would be an insult to goose feather down. The only checks that seemed to matter to Avs players tonight were ones that say “Pay to the order of…”
Wasn’t this an Avs team that was supposed to have been fired up again after that comeback win in Toronto? Wasn’t this supposed to be a team that really wanted to finish up this cross-country Canadian road trip with a win, then take that five-hour flight home in happy comfort? Wasn’t this supposed to be a team that had a little extra motivation, because of that Sens’ first-round pick and all?
Guess not.
Maybe the scariest thing of all for Avs coach Jared Bednar: It seemed like he’d thought his team had turned the corner the other night too, that there could be no way it could play a game like this so soon afterward. He wore a stunned look while facing the media. I asked him: Does it worry you, as a coach, when you don’t really know what you’re going to get, effort-wise, from your team?
“Yeah, of course. Absolutely. No question,” Bednar said. “If we’re competing the way we need to compete, then sometimes you get the results and sometimes you don’t. I feel like we’ve been getting a little bit of bad luck lately and you’re hoping that a game like Toronto turns it around. But the effort part of it’s gotta be there first. Tonight, the breakdowns were effort-based.”
More than anything, Bednar looked like the disappointed parent, having just caught his kid smoking pot after promising to buckle down on his grades. Or something like that.
“Just not ready to play tonight,” Bednar said. “Way below average road trip. Didn’t get the results we wanted. Play was below average. Can’t take nights off.”
What did Avs players have to say for themselves?
“We talked before the game about how it wasn’t going to be easy. You can’t look at where they are in the standings and expect to have an easy game,” Erik Johnson told BSN Denver.
But that’s exactly how the Avs seemed to think it would be, that they’d just have to come into the Canadian Tire Center, throw their sticks on the ice and that would be enough to spook the lowly Sens. Instead, the Avs watched as Senator after Senator did all the hustling, hard-working things and they didn’t. Before you knew it, it was 2-0, then 3-0, before the Avs got a token goal to make it 3-1, then let up again.
The capper to this night of absolute misery for the Avs, of course, were two goals by Matt Duchene. On his birthday, just a few days after his first child, a son named Beau, was born, Duchene had all the time in the world to grab a rebound off the back boards and put a shot past a beaten, beleaguered Semyon Varlamov close to the midway mark of the third that made it a 4-1 game.
“I think we were ready to play, but I think it was just (lack of) execution,” Johnson said.
But Bednar said there was no effort, and that’s what had him so mystified.
“You can’t be coaching effort. It’s almost February,” Bednar said. “If the effort’s not there, for whatever reason…there’s nothing else to it. You can’t look past that. That’s a prerequisite to everything else.”
The puck support that was there in abundance in Toronto was nowhere to be found further down the Ontarian road here. The Avs couldn’t complete a five-foot pass was roughly the first 30 minutes of the game. They took bad penalties, didn’t go hard to the net, ceded all the ice in front of their own net.
Just a horror show from start to finish. Don’t be fooled by that little mini-comeback at the end, either.
“They came out a lot harder than we did,” D-man Mark Barberio said. “We didn’t take care of the puck in our D-zone and gave them a lot of momentum off of turnovers. I think they took that momentum into the second period, and Varly kept us in it. But we were just flat. Just a flat game from us tonight. We had a late push tonight, but just too late.”
At least this road trip is over. At least they get to go back to home environs, where another last-place team, the Los Angeles Kings, await on Saturday.
Oh that’s right – the Avs already lost to the Kings at home not too long ago.
Who knows what kind of Avs team will show up, or how things will go from here on out.
For Bednar and the Avs and their fans, the fact that nobody seems to know what their identity is right now?
That’s the most worrisome part.
0 Comments (13 conversations)
AllezAllezAllez
Ya’ll have said it on the podcast a few times that the leadership in the locker room doesn’t know how to win. With that being said and with this slump reaching critical mass is it time to start thinking about moving on from some bigger pieces? I get it sets the rebuild back but this mentality poisons young players and spans multiple seasons. Hope the top line has fun at the all star game because it’s looking like a not fun run to end the season after that.
Steve -B
Nice, channeled the fans frustration in this one quite well. What an opportunity lost to get Varly’s confidence up as well. After your goalie who has struggled saves your bacon in the 1st, you don’t come out in the second and play the exact same level of uninspired hockey.
KCRybek
One line team with shabby goaltending
Johnny M
Morale is back in the shitter. New leadership, maybe strip Gabe and bring in someone through a trade? I don’t know if that’s a valid idea, just tossing things at the wall to see what sticks at this point. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Barrie go in a trade, for sure.
Bgravel
They need some grit on the 4th Line and more talent on the 2nd …..a trade please a , Burakovsky , Ferland , Anderson or Crouse please Joe …….And bring AJGreer to play 10 Min …..play Zad more and play with EJ , Girard -Cole please
ahinton54
I believe someone on these threads recently stated that the Avs are close to being cup contenders…you have got to be kidding me. How can professionals get called out for effort of all things? That’s the kind of thing you teach to bantams not professionals. PATHETIC.
jjs3616
AD, curious if Dutchy went to dinner or anything with any of the guys? Does he have any friends left on this team or have all those bridges been burned? Thanks for your coverage of another stinker by our boys.
Adrian Dater
AuthorHe said he did, yes
Steve Cañon
I don’t get the lack of effort and lackadaisical, cavalier approach. The boys embarrassed themselves, tonight.
jpwheels
I agree with Steve -B, this is a good piece Dater.
There a few things about this team that both puzzle and frustrated the hell out of me.
1- starting games flat. It happens to every team occasionally. But this team is making a habit of it…a very bad habit.
2- lack of effort. Bednar nailed it — the effort has to be there first. All of these guys spout on and on how they love to play the game. But the lack of effort in games like tonight isn’t playing the game, it’s just being there. How about being a professional and actually trying.
3- playing down to weaker teams. I’m starting to wonder if this team thinks it’s so good it can take a night off and still beat teams that are lower in the standings. I have no idea what else the player’s mindset could be when the team lays a big, hard-boiled egg against a team they should wax easily.
Lastly, I’m sure I’ll hear/read as I click around the interwebs tonight about the team is still young and needs to learn how to win…or it’s not about W/L, it’s about the process. I do understand those things and can’t completely disagree with them. But, honestly, they’re starting to sound like excuses. We know very little about what goes on between coaches & players and players & players when they aren’t on the ice. But I’m starting to think that there’s a big problem with accountability on all levels with this team. The kind of garbage the Avs displayed tonight should be unacceptable on every front to everyone involved with the team. And they all know it, and some have said it in the past. But whatever they’re doing to address it isn’t working.
DP10
If you keep going down by 2 goals+, you can’t expect to win. Why do they keep getting into these holes? What part does the coach play in this scenario. How much of this is due to team leadership? Is it all just due a mental break down or is the ice structurally tilted against them?
The Avs are the worst team in the NHL since the beginning of December. In terms of results they have officially regressed to their ‘16/17 form.
If it is all mental, maybe a major shake up like firing the coach, benching some of their perennial underperformers or trading a big name might wake them up. Or maybe they are just structurally so deficient that they need to recognize that the rebuild on this team is still not complete. In that case, Sakic needs to make a sober analysis of the roster: Varlamov, Johnson (for their advancing age), Jost (while he is still considered a prospect and can fetch a return), Andrighetto and Nieto because they have clearly hit their ceiling… there are plenty of candidates on this roster that might be worth moving ahead of what will be a draft with 1 or 2 high picks.
DP10
PS: i am curious: is it fair to say that these two games will prove to be the turning point of the season..for better or for worse? It seems to me that following up a bit of a breakout performance (vs the Leafs) with such a thud can either galvanize the squad’s resolve or break their spirit in a much more lasting fashion. I am reminded a bit of that late season meltdown under Roy in 2016. They had a string of really bad results against the Flyers, capitals and the Wild that ultimately buried their playoff hopes (despite a realistic shot at squeezing into the post season) and would set them up for the disastrous 2016/17 season.
Wesley
The problem is this has been happening throughout this slump. A complete stomping by the Avs (Rangers, Leafs, Etc.) Then 3 or 4 games of getting dominated by whoever they play next, regardless of quality of competition.
BenV
As if there were any other possible outcome…
Bob_W
You cannot manufacture hunger to win or desparation to win. You have to actually feel it. This team has demonstrated repeatly that they do not. If and when they do actually feel it then it will consume them 24 hours a day. They will have trouble sleeping. They will be chomping at the bit to get back on the ice for the next game. They will take it to their opponents like demons out of hell from start of the 1st period to the end of the 3rd. Until we see them do all this there is no way we can believe they are any different from the team of the season before last.
jpwheels
Bingo!
But the most confusing and frustrating thing is that they did have that hunger and desperation at the start of the season.
So something changed. I have no idea what changed. And it sure as hell looks like nobody with the team does either or has a clue as how to fix whatever the issue is.
ahinton54
Bob, great commentary. You know what they are hungry for? Paychecks.