Rantanen's return fuels another Chicago beatdown

While I haven’t been covering the Avalanche for as long as some of my colleagues, this being my fifth year in action on the beat means I’ve been to several hundred games in that time and have been inside a few locker rooms.

One of the things I notice the most about this year’s Avalanche team is the locker room. In the last two years, wins were cause for a lot of excitement. It was a young team just enjoying life and whatever good that came of it was great.

Losses had a more despondent feel where it seemed like the end of the world and it was time for a meal at Arby’s.

This year, however, there isn’t quite the same level of living in the moment. It would seem one of the NHL’s youngest squads has used the last two years to learn that the regular season is certainly important but it’s a means to an end.

The regular season is about setting up for playoff success, getting home-ice advantage and making teams come through your barn if they want to advance. It’s less about riding the wave and more about managing it.

In a season where they’ve been beset by more injuries than you can shake a stick at, this maturation has been key for the Avalanche. It’s hard to envision the Avs of the past surviving a month with the injuries they had in November.

Not only did the Avs survive, but they finished November second in the Central Division and third in the Western Conference. That is to say, there’s significantly more room below them than above them despite the adversity.

Following tonight’s 7-3 stomping of the Chicago Blackhawks, the Avalanche find themselves on a three-game winning streak after a 24-hour period in which they outscored Chicago 12-5 in a home-and-home set.

The Blackhawks aren’t what they used to be but the real lesson to take from tonight, the night in which Mikko Rantanen returned to give Colorado two of their three-headed monster back, is Colorado isn’t what it used to be either.

And what the Avs used to be was a pushover. A team whose talent and maturity dictated they play to their competition. Get up for good teams, get bored against bad teams.

But right now we’re seeing a different kind of Avalanche team. With Rantanen back in the fold, the Avs coughed up the early lead on a Brandon Saad short-handed goal just 1:37 into the game.

Past Avs teams would’ve taken that punch to the chin and eaten the mat. They would’ve felt sorry for themselves and let Chicago build from it. Instead, Colorado pushed back.

Hard.

And after all the dust had settled, Colorado held a 3-1 lead on the back of two Nazem Kadri goals and had killed off a five-on-three in the first period. The Avs entered the second period with work to do as just over 2:30 of Chicago power play time remained.

The Avs killed it off and as Ryan Graves left the penalty box, he made a great play to spring Joonas Donskoi for a breakaway goal to make it 4-1. Fast forward to just beyond the halfway mark of the game and it was 7-1.

Donskoi had four points (2g, 2a), Rantanen had four (1g, 3a), MacKinnon had three (1g, 2a) and they had run Robin Lehner, the NHL’s leader in save percentage entering the game, from the game and had started in on Corey Crawford for the second straight night.

Rantanen didn’t play in the third due to precautionary reasons and was long gone by the time the media arrived in the postgame locker room.

The players who were there, however, talked about the obvious: getting Rantanen back was great, playing at home was great, they were a proud and talented group who had found their way through the injury forest.

But there was no abundance of celebration. It was just another win in a season this team expects to win an awful lot. The expectation is their off-ice wins (mainly players getting healthy) will lead to even more on-ice wins.

Gabe Landeskog, Matt Calvert, and maybe even Andre Burakovsky could all be available for the upcoming road trip next week.

With November in the books, Colorado is six points behind the Blues for first in the division. They are now the most prolific scoring offense in the Western Conference and lead the NHL in goals-per-game. That six-point deficit might not be nearly enough once the Avs are fully healthy.

Based on their postgame locker room tonight, nobody knows that better than the Colorado Avalanche.

GAME TAKEAWAYS

• I’m not even sure what to say about this beatdown. It was extremely impressive and the Avs improved to 8-1-3 in their last 12 against Chicago.
• That might be what I noticed most about this game. How quickly it shifted from Chicago being a dominant, three-time Stanley Cup-winning organization to one that just a few years later didn’t belong on the same ice as the Avalanche. The Avs were always frisky with Chicago during their glory years but there was something almost sad about watching an aging Jonathan Toews chase around some of Colorado’s young guns while trailing 7-2 and knowing it wasn’t getting any better this year for that team. Everything is cyclical in the NHL but the way the world just moves on is cruel.
• I’ll remember this when MacKinnon gets into his 30s. Late next decade. Hahahaha.
• Not to get all Deckard Cain on everyone but there was a time when this game wasn’t a blowout. In that time, Chicago had a five-on-three advantage after Ryan Graves was called for a double-minor high-sticking penalty. And in that time, they created several golden scoring chances and Philipp Grubauer locked it down. It was a hard no from him. When the first period ended with the score still at 3-1, Colorado escaped the most dangerous time of the game for a Blackhawks comeback. As soon as that penalty ended, Donskoi scored on a great feed from Graves to make it 4-1 and it was curtains from there. It’s not often you point out a goaltender’s brilliance in a blowout but the game may never reach that level without Grubauer locking it down.
• There really aren’t enough words to describe the brilliance of both MacKinnon and Rantanen. They are something special and Avs fans should appreciate that they have a very young, very special group to watch over the next few years. Given how they’ve handled endless adversity this year (by, you know, winning), it’s fair to believe this could be a special season in the making.
• Cale Makar, NHL leader in posts hit, dinged another one tonight. Somehow in this explosion of offense, he managed to go without points. He did put on a clinic in the third period on how to break up an odd-man rush as the only man back. That’s that Norris stuff.
• Sam Girard and Alex DeBrincat getting into a fight was not something I saw coming…ever. I’m not sure if there’s ever been a smaller fight between the 5’7″, 165-pound DeBrincat and the 5’9″, 180-pound Girard but it was a pretty entertaining tilt nonetheless. Tiny but mighty.