A "busted play" helped win the Avs a playoff game, and might help swing the series, too

CALGARY, Alberta – It was all drawn up nice by Jared Bednar on his waxy chalkboard. His Avalanche team would win a faceoff and score the tying goal in a playoff game against the Calgary Flames, then hope to go on and win from there. That’s exactly what happened – except none of it really went as planned.

“It was a busted play,” said Nathan MacKinnon.

The Avs were down 2-1, with the clock ticking to under three minutes left. A faceoff in the Calgary zone was forthcoming, and J.T. Compher was the man Bednar designated to take it, against Calgary’s Elias Lindholm – whose faceoff-winning percentage in the regular season was among the league’s best, at 54.3.

Except, Compher never took the draw. The linesman kicked him out, presumably for cheating too quick. In came MacKinnon. The star of the Avs has been all that and a bag of chips the last couple years, but faceoffs are still a problem for him in general. On this one, though, he did a good enough job of wresting control backward, but Compher did the real work in jumping on the 50-50 puck and getting it back to point man Tyson Barrie.

From there, Barrie fed Mikko Rantanen down along the halfboards. He threw the puck on net, and Gabe Landeskog shuffled the puck away from Mike Smith and onto Compher’s charging backhand. Tie game.

“That wasn’t the drawn-up play at all. Comph got kicked out, and I won it to Comph. Then I switched with Gabe – we were planning on switching – and then they got lost. We didn’t plan that at all. We were joking how we drew it up, but that wasn’t it at all,” MacKinnon said. “The play was to get me a (one-timer) or whatever. But we’ll take it.”

From there, we know what happened. MacKinnon took a Rantanen lead pass and smoked Smith up high to the far corner, evening the series at one game apiece, with Game 3 set for Monday night at the Pepsi Center.

The fact is, the Avs deserved to win this game. They were by far the better puck-possession team, but it took a busted play and a little luck in OT to actually win it. Michael Frolik almost won it on a doorstep chance right before Ian Cole got the puck up to Rantanen, who fed MacKinnon in full stride just at the Calgary blue line.

Compher, who has a kind of assassin mentality to him in the clutch, echoed how MacKinnon described the tying sequence.

“It wasn’t as clean as we would have wanted, but it got the puck going toward the net and that was the plan, getting pucks and bodies to the net,” Compher said. “But we had confidence in OT from there. We felt we played a really good game for 60 minutes, and that we just had to continue to do that and we’d get our chances. We just had to bury one, and Nate – he stepped up in the biggest moment of the year, just like we knew he would.”

The Avs should have some good momentum going home from this win. They have outplayed the No. 1 Western seed Calgary for large portions of the series so far, but the win did not come without some cost.

Top-2 defender Sam Girard left the game in overtime after taking a hit from Sam Bennett – a hit in which Bennett leaped off his feet. If Girard can’t play, it would create a big void on the blue line.

But there is a kid named Cale Makar who might be able to step in.

Stay tuned on that one.

For now, the Avs are just happy to go home with a win under their belts. Even, if it came off a broken play.