One of the things I love most about watching sports is when you see a player who, even at the highest level, does things other players simply cannot. We are into the seventh season of watching Nathan MacKinnon so it’s easy to take him for granted at times but he certainly stands out as one of the NHL’s bests.…...

Entering tonight’s game against the Nashville Predators, the Avalanche had absolutely nothing going for them. Injuries to 25% of their forward corps and, as of today, their starting goaltender, had found a home in Colorado’s dressing room. They had lost five straight games, essentially giving back the gains they made with their league-leading hot start. And they were playing a…...

Erik Johnson – B- I actually felt like EJ was one of the better Avs tonight. I liked his defense and I saw him at least trying to press some offense when he saw opportunities. His best rush of the night ended in him being tripped and it not being called. That feels like a decent snapshot of the night.…...

DALLAS – A crash was always coming. But after a 7-0-1 start, the Avalanche will wake up on November 6 and find themselves at 8-5-2 following their fifth straight loss, a 4-1 decision at the Dallas Stars. “A stretch like this sucks either way,” Erik Johnson said. “I don’t care what our record was to start the year. It’s no…...

“If we want to win games, we’ve got to start strong. Right now we’re not doing that.” That was the first thing Cale Makar said to me following Colorado’s 2-1 loss to the Dallas Stars. It wasn’t that the Avs didn’t show up this time, like in their other two regulation losses against Anaheim and St. Louis where they never…...

There are a few games every year where you just give away the game. In their 12th game of the season, the Avs finally had one of those nights. They pulled a point but in the locker room after their 4-3 overtime loss to the Florida Panthers, it was the one that got away they couldn’t stop thinking about. “Yeah,…...

An 82-game regular season is never easy to navigate. A week after Mikko Rantanen pretzel’d himself into a lower-body injury that appears to be trending more towards short-term, the Avalanche rocked the hockey world this morning when they announced Gabe Landeskog was going to be out indefinitely with a lower-body injury. The Avs last played on Saturday night and…...

Erik Johnson – D Sometimes guys have tough nights in the box score when they really didn’t do a lot to earn it. This is best represented by plus/minus and the way people try to use it to interpret how good or bad a player was during that game. Tonight, Johnson earned the negative two by playing key roles in…...

When Lazlo Holmes went showed up and said “Let’s do that hockey”, one team in the Pepsi Center actually seemed to listen to him. And it wasn’t the Colorado Avalanche. Following a 6-1 destruction of the Vegas Golden Knights, the Avs returned home to the Pepsi Center for their first home game in two weeks and got beat up in…...

You know sometimes you go into matchmaking with a group of friends and you get into a game where the opposing team is a bunch of randos who have never played together before? That was kind of the video game equivalent of the Avalanche annihilating Vegas today. The 6-1 Avalanche win comes on Nevada Day, a holiday nobody outside of…...

In sports, as in life, adversity is never far away, always closer than the horizon would suggest. In a 7-0-1 start, Colorado handled a little adversity well and certainly had their share of luck along the way. All of that ran out tonight in a classic house of horrors for them as they lost 3-1 to the St. Louis Blues.…...

Coming in on the second night of a back to back (SEGABABA) against a rested team, this was the old “scheduled loss” for the Avalanche in Tampa Bay. Instead, Tyson Jost turned into his own personal breakout as Colorado exacted a little revenge for a loss that started a dark period of the season last year for the Avs. Colorado…...

It was a pretty wild one in Sunrise, Florida tonight as the Avalanche kept their hot start going with a 5-4 overtime win against the Panthers. Nathan MacKinnon won it in OT on a wrist shot that beat Sergei Bobrovsky. It was the only point Colorado’s top line scored all game. That’s because Joonas Donskoi (1 g, 2 a) and…...

Erik Johnson – C- Johnson’s turnover trying to fire a puck through traffic in the neutral zone directly led to the second Pittsburgh goal and that continues to be a problem that plagues him. There were some good moments from him, though, just not enough to make up for his big mistake of the evening. Cale Makar – B I…...

Every game tells its own story and through the first five games of the season, the story came down to finishing. After going 5-0 and not trailing in a third period all season, the Avalanche found themselves in a new situation. How teams respond to adversity and what they look like when trailing changes from year to year and having…...

The Avs certainly weren’t perfect in their 4-2 win over Boston but a win is a win and the guys were plenty pleased after the game to take the W. First up, the man with the game-winning goal, Andre Burakovsky. Next, the stonewall on the back end, the man Cale Makar called “the backbone of the team,” Philipp Grubauer And…...

During Colorado’s long wait between games two and three, the seasons managed to change from fall to winter and back to fall. Colorado, eh? As the Avs sat around waiting for their next victim, the NHL continued on. In Vancouver last night, highly-touted defenseman Quinn Hughes finally scored his first NHL goal in his eighth NHL game. The Canucks announcers…...

Gabriel Landeskog – A Landeskog is already on the familiar PPG pace he set last season. Tonight, he got the game-winner by standing backdoor and letting Rantanen find him with a great pass. That top line has picked up where it left off last year. Nathan MacKinnon – A- Kind of? MacKinnon had two assists but seemed a little more…...

Nathan MacKinnon is a superstar. Mikko Rantanen is right behind him. The world seemingly expects Cale Makar to cure cancer in between shifts. It can be easy to forget the steady presence of Gabe Landeskog, who plays third banana on the league’s most dominant top line. It’s a new year but the same old captain for the Avalanche as he…...