Avalanche beat Kings Game 1 Studs & Duds: Elite talent shines

Studs

Colorado’s stars

Mikko Rantanen had four points. Nathan MacKinnon had three points. Cale Makar had two points. They are widely considered three of the 15 or so best skaters in the world. Tonight, they showed everyone why the Avalanche are to be feared. Their best players are, simply put, better than the best players on other teams, even very well-built rosters a la the Los Angeles Kings.

They got the Avs going early. They built the lead in the second period before things started going a little sideways. Then they helped close the game with an absolute master class of a shift that resulted in the fourth goal to give the Avalanche a two-goal lead in the third period.

This is what elite players can do. If you look all over the league, good players have big nights all the time. Brock Boeser scored four goals in Vancouver tonight, for example. Colorado’s holy trinity, however, habitually wins the Avalanche games. Four-point nights are still special, of course, especially when MacKinnon and Rantanen went primarily head-to-head against Drew Doughty and Anze Kopitar, two guys who might be older but are still the best the Kings have to offer.

I’m going to pull video in the morning and try to do a separate post on what made some of their shifts so special so be on the lookout for that but my goodness do the Avs walk into every NHL game with the single greatest talent advantage in the league in these three players.

Alexandar Georgiev

I don’t tend to lump Georgiev into the same category as Colorado’s “stars” but after last season he’s pushing to be included the same way Devon Toews frequently slides into that conversation.

Tonight, Georgiev put a damn fine performance onto the ice. After getting down 3-0 early in the second period, the Kings began to really push and force a litany of mistakes from the Avalanche. What resulted could have been a bloodbath as the Kings had advantages in scoring chances (10-2) and high-danger chances (4-0) at 5v5. They had taken control of the game and were mounting a comeback.

Two goals got by him but the first was a tip-in from about two feet away and the other was off Makar’s stick on a hard-luck bounce. Beyond that, Georgiev made a handful of stops on the doorstep and was Colorado’s best penalty killer, especially in the third period when Bo Byram was called for back-to-back penalties with the Avs nursing a 3-2 lead.

A .944 save percentage is a great start to the season but I think what’s most impressive is that Georgiev didn’t really have to make any highlight reel saves. He read the play wonderfully and was in position to gobble pucks up and didn’t kick out many rebounds to create secondary scoring chances for the Kings. It was a top-notch performance from Colorado’s underrated netminder.

Special teams

The power play scored on one of three chances, which is the kind of percentage this talented group should be striving to achieve across the regular season. The goal was a thing of beauty, too, as Rantanen ignored what should have been a drop pass to MacKinnon and gained the offensive zone with control.

From there, he moved the puck back to the point, where MacKinnon one-touched a beautiful backhand pass across the blueline to Makar. Makar corralled the puck, walked into some space, created a screen with the defending Kings player and found the back of the net with a perfectly placed shot. That unit was strong all night.

The penalty kill, however, was led by a great performance from Georgiev first and foremost. The unit has work to do as they allowed the Kings to generate 17 scoring chances and seven high-danger chances in 10 minutes of PK time, but LA failed to convert on any of their five opportunities with the man advantage and that was a primary reason the Avalanche won this game.

The killing of the two penalties in the third period was especially crucial because opening the first seven minutes with a one-goal lead and having to kill four minutes of penalties is a challenging task but the Avs were up to it thanks to a well-balanced group that is clearly still trying to find the right mix of players right now.

A shocking 13 (!!) skaters played more than one minute of short-handed time for the Avs tonight, including all six defensemen. Jared Bednar is probably going to take a while to drill down into the guys he really trusts there but it says something about this team’s construction that he’s starting with so much to work with.

Duds

Bowen Byram’s two penalties

The penalty calls in this game were tough because they felt quite soft through two periods and then Byram made the job pretty easy in the third period. He was called for cross-checking and then boarding, but in reality both probably should have been boarding penalties.

The first one was blatant and a major “what are you doing?” moment and the second one looked a lot more like the call was in reaction to Adrian Kempe going down and grabbing his head right away than a serious penalty. Either way, Byram ended up in the box twice in the opening five minutes of the third period while the Avs were protecting a one-goal lead.

That’s the kind of stuff that makes closing games a lot harder to do. His teammates picked him up tonight but you’d like to see the penalty-prone play that has plagued Byram a little toned down a bit moving forward.

Ryan Johansen

There are a lot of moving parts on this Avalanche forward corps and Johansen was brought in to do arguably the most important job of all the new guys as the second-line center. It wasn’t a great initial outing as his 5v5 play looked very uninspired and his line was Colorado’s quietest from beginning to end.

I did like his work on the power play and he was involved in a couple of good moments, but overall this wasn’t the performance that is going to win over a fan base and team that is waiting to see just how the mercurial Johansen does in an environment he’s never really been in before.

Tonight felt like the most glaring example of the new guy trying to fit into a new environment.

Josh Manson and Jack Johnson

I’m lumping them here together because both had terrible underlying numbers and were mostly a pairing together at 5v5. Both had better numbers with other D partners, suggesting this just may not be a very good match. It’s always easy to say “It’s only one game” but as two holdovers from their Stanley Cup run together, we’ve seen them together before and it’s always more of an adventure than I think Bednar would like from the bottom of his defense.

They combined to help create the first Kings goal when Johnson was actively losing a footrace to a puck, got there just in time and threw a blind backhand up the wall where Manson was kind of in position to receive the pass.

We’ll never know how it would have gone had Manson not fallen down, but there was no other Avalanche support in the area and there were three Kings. Johnson was knocked down by Carl Grundstrom after making the pass, leaving both Avalanche defenders on the ice as Danault gathered the puck and threw it towards the net where Grundstrom deflected it in.

It was way too easy on that goal and, in general, that pairing made things way too easy on the Kings.

For his part, Johnson did have the primary assist on Colorado’s fourth goal when he just threw a puck at the net and Rantanen deflected it in. Johnson made the right play and the Avs were rewarded with a two-goal lead, so it wasn’t all bad.

Unsung Hero

Ross Colton

So my eyes absolutely loved Colton tonight. Anecdotally, it just felt like he was all over the place and had a noticeable presence all game. You saw him throwing his weight around, messing with opposing players (Phil Danault was not a fan) and getting pucks on net.

The underlying numbers aren’t just poor, they’re ghastly. At 5v5, he was on the ice for just six shot attempts for and 19 against. That 24% was easily the worst on the Avalanche. The scoring chances favored the Kings 12-2 at 5v5. It’s not hard to felt like an awful lot of the dangerous play from Los Angeles in the first two periods came at the expense of Ross Colton.

So why is he in this section?

Because it felt very different from last season when a rotating cast of characters tried their hand at anchoring Colorado’s third line and drifted through games like ghosts far too frequently.

Also, Colton had some individually great moments on the penalty kill, one of the responsibilities he’s being given early in the season to see how he responds. In a perfect world, Colton becomes a guy who plays on Colorado’s PK and PP and his bruising playstyle is a catalyst for misery for opposing teams.

Those moments were encouraging that Colton can grow into this role and, if we’re being honest here, there won’t be many teams in the NHL where Colton’s primary matchup is going to be against a player as solid as Danault, one of the league’s underrated defensive centers who has also 50-point seasons each of the last two years.

In short, Danault is the NHL’s best 3C right now and that’s a tough opening assignment for Colton. He got through it and showed enough to feel like this experiment could really work for the Avalanche.