Another offensive outage costs the Avalanche

The Colorado Avalanche finished their three-game road trip tonight in Winnipeg with a 3-0 loss to the Jets. The loss dropped the Avs to 1-2 on the trip as they failed to get the offense revved up in two of the three games with one goal against Chicago and zero tonight.

Tonight’s loss is disappointing as the Avs had a golden opportunity to cut deeper into the Central Division-leading Jets in the standings but just couldn’t get anything going offensively.

The Avs will have two days off to think about this setback before they get the New York Rangers on Tuesday night back in Denver.

Let’s talk about this loss and the road trip in general.

Connor Hellebuyck shuts the door again

It’s not a shame getting shut out by the reigning Vezina Trophy winner who is well on his way to winning another one as the league’s top goaltender, but the Avalanche have not solved Connor Hellebuyck in three straight games in the regular season.

The “regular season” part of that is relevant because we all remember what Colorado did to Hellebuyck and the Jets in the postseason last year, but they cannot seem to find their prolific offense against this Jets team.

While Hellebuyck obviously gets credit for again not allowing any goals against, it’s the Avalanche offense that failed to test him that was most disappointing. It was a competitive first period and the Avs put up 10 shots on goal, but could not come close to sustaining that as they managed only one shot on goal from a forward in the second period and five total.

Colorado’s defense is a frequent contributor on offense, but it can’t be the sole provider of offense, not even with Cale Makar hanging around. The fancy stats are even worse. Colorado managed three high-danger chances in the first period and zero the rest of the game at 5v5.

With a 2-0 deficit in the third period against a team that played a tight-checking game against the Los Angeles Kings last night, I thought maybe we would see a spirited push from the Avs in the third period. I was wrong.

Hellebuyck gets the third straight shutout (going back to last season), but the Avs sure didn’t make it hard for him.

Colorado’s stars don’t shine

Cale Makar got fooled badly on the game-winning goal from Nikolaj Ehlers, which came just 1:08 into the game, and didn’t ever get the offense going. Nathan MacKinnon and Mikko Rantanen got a few shots on goal, but only Rantanen had a decent look at the net. Hellebuyck shut him down.

While the Jets played last night, they are in the middle of an eight-game homestand while the Avs are finishing three games in four nights, all on the road. That’s tough and all, but I don’t really care.

Over the last five games, Colorado has scored the following goals:

-1 vs. Montreal
-3 vs. Florida (1 ENG)
-1 vs. Chicago
-6 vs. Minnesota
-0 vs. Winnipeg

The game against the Wild is a massive outlier as we see a Colorado offense that has gone very dark. It’s a minor miracle they managed to go 2-2-1 in those five games, but the Avalanche offense has to get back to humming and that starts with their tone-setting superstars.

We can’t even look at those games and say that they did all of the work. They scored only a power-play goal against the Habs and got no other help, their only goal against Florida was the empty-net goal, they combined for goals 3 and 6 against the Wild, and then obviously nothing against the Jets.

This hasn’t been a case of Colorado’s Holy Trinity doing all the heavy lifting and not getting help. The others have been chipping in offense, they just haven’t done their part. It doesn’t happen often, but that’s been the case lately. Tonight against the Jets, they managed only six shots on goal as a trio, zero from Makar.

The struggles of the power play are largely on them as they play a huge amount of the power play time and usually they aren’t even competitive. Since December 1, the Avs power play was 28th in the NHL with a 13.7% success rate and that was before they went scoreless on two attempts tonight.

There’s no dressing this up outside of the Avalanche offense got put into the proverbial chokehold and only tapped out because the clock hit 0:00.

Mackenzie Blackwood still rocks

He also didn’t have a ton to do, but Blackwood stood tall in his own end and allowed just two goals yet again. That’s 11 appearances for the Avs and zero times has he allowed more than two goals against as Winnipeg’s third goal tonight was an empty-netter.

Blackwood finished with 26 saves on 28 shots for a .929, well short of the .940 save percentage he had been putting up in an Avs uniform before tonight. Clearly, this was Blackwood’s fault.

Jokes aside, this is another solid feather in Blackwood’s cap as he continues to quietly build up his case as one of the big omissions from Team Canada’s roster at the upcoming Four Nations tournament. If Blackwood continues playing at such a high level, he will start putting himself on the map for the Canadian Olympic squad next year, which would be cool.

Anyway, Blackwood was good yet again, but got no help from the offense in front of him.