Avalanche Film Room: The dagger that finished a predator

Every year there are defining moments throughout the season that people get attached to because they were either so unexpected or so spectacular (or both) that they couldn’t help but be etched into your memories forever.

When I think back to last year and Colorado’s unexpected run to the postseason, I obviously remember the 10-game winning streak and the game 82 win over St. Louis but I also remember the two-game road trip to Minnesota and St. Louis where the Avs beat both teams in arenas they’ve badly struggled in for many years. It was a shocking turn of events and one of the things I’ll remember most about that season.

This season, the Avs just finished up a similar road trip as they walked into Chicago and beat a very hot Blackhawks team in regulation before hopping down to Nashville and blowing out the Predators in a building they hadn’t won in since 2016 before this season. Now, they’ve won twice. Sports!

The play that arguably sealed the deal against Nashville yesterday was Gabe Landeskog’s goal that made it 3-0 in the dying moments of the second period and really deflated whatever hope was left from Nashville of a comeback. Let’s break down how it happened.

Hard work matters

Landeskog starts this sequence chasing down the puck carrier, Viktor Arvidsson, and providing pressure. As they get through the neutral zone, the combination of Sam Girard maintaining a perfect gap and pressuring with his stick and Landeskog’s backcheck forced the puck to get dropped to Ryan Ellis and Landeskog correctly reads the situation and drops his pursuit to pressure Ellis. Since the last film room showed Landeskog blowing a defensive coverage, it’s only fair the universe provided an example of him making the right read after his dogged pursuit of the puck through three zones.

Landeskog gets physical

Olivia Newton-John approved, this is really pretty simple. Ellis gets the puck dropped to him and Landeskog just rocks his world. He bodies Ellis hard enough to stun him and separate him from the puck. Once Ellis recovers, he has a clear two-step advantage on Landeskog but with 92 in white moving like a freight train again and Ellis stationary, Ellis panics to move the puck and loses his footing as he helplessly backhands the puck to the nearest player, Carl Soderberg. Whoops!

Also of note here is Girard’s read of the play. As soon as he sees the puck get to Soderberg, he breaks up the ice at full speed.

Transition goals are sexy goals

This is the easy part of the breakdown, right? Soderberg takes the gift from Ellis, hits Landeskog and he and Girard go streaking down the ice. This is where the read from Girard comes into play. Because he broke hard upon seeing the puck get to Soderberg, it creates the two on one as Roman Josi has to come from the left side across to provide the only line of defense for the Predators in the two on one. Landeskog finds Girard with a nice pass (we’ll get to that) and Girard simply outwaits everyone else as Pekka Rinne fully commits to stopping a Girard shot, which never comes. Instead, Girard slips the puck through traffic and Landeskog taps it into an open net. It looks easy but some different camera angles below will really highlight the skill involved.

The right sauce

I liked this camera angle of the goal because it really shows the pass from Landeskog here. He has his head up the entire way and it’s the kind of saucer pass that Ryan Wilson would be proud of as it lands flat right on Girard’s blade. Girard controls it and forces Rinne to commit all the way and finds Landeskog on the backdoor for the successful give and go. Somewhere Nikola Jokic is proud.

A sneaky good pass

On the live viewing, I didn’t think much of Girard’s pass to Landeskog. It looked pretty easy and standard stuff. I saw this camera angle and while it still wasn’t a pass with a high degree of difficulty, with a Norris-caliber defense in Josi defending there and the large frame of Rinne to contend with, the window for making that pass was quite a smaller than it looks on the original look. With Ellis coming back hard and getting his stick on Landeskog’s hands, Girard’s timing ended up being perfect. He opened the window, saw it, and fit the puck into it before Ellis was able to get back and disrupt Landeskog tapping the puck home.

In a special addition to the Film Room, we managed to capture a live picture of Predators general manager David Poile watching his former draft pick Girard help end Nashville’s night in style: