Avalanche collapse again in embarrassing loss to Vancouver

Things were fine. The Colorado Avalanche appeared to be in control of a game they should have been as they were cruising up 2-0 against the Vancouver Canucks.

The Avs had their two-goal lead and shots were relatively even and the Avs’ penalty issues were matched only by Vancouver’s tendency to take a penalty while on the power play, thus negating their own advantage.

Things were fine! The game was beyond the halfway mark and all was running smoothly. Colorado had gotten goals from Mikko Rantanen and Sam Girard to give them their multi-goal lead against a bad Canucks team playing their third-string goaltender.

Colorado’s four-game losing streak appeared in real jeopardy.

Then Devon Toews, a guy who has done little wrong in his Avalanche tenure and whose hockey IQ has taken over the rest of his attributes as he became known as the guy who simply made the right plays all the time, took his foot off the gas going back to retrieve a puck on a would-be icing.

Toews looked back and saw Jack Studnicka was catching up to him and quickly. Normally, this is still called icing and everyone just moves on. In this case, however, icing was waved off and Studnicka’s momentum allowed him to overtake Toews in the race for the puck.

Toews lost the footrace and then was called for hooking as he chased the puck up the boards. The call was one of those “by the strictest letter of the law” type of calls and the stick was briefly into the hands of the Canucks player, so it was called. People will lie and pretend “it gets called every time” but we’ve seen several examples of this going uncalled just in Avalanche games in the last week. So, sketchy call to me.

The Canucks hit the power play again and not much was happening on it. Andrew Cogliano went to rim a puck around the boards hoping for an up-and-out scenario. Inexplicably, the official was in the corner with his back to the wall, instead of circling out into the empty space as he was supposed to. The puck got all of the official, and bounced to the Canucks, who scored immediately to make it 2-1.

This entire sequence changed the entire flow and course of the hockey game and was classic Avs over the last two weeks. Officials made two iffy calls both on the icing and then the hooking call. Toews put himself into a position to be on the wrong end of each call. It was bad hockey and bad luck, all wrapped into one, capped off by a clearing attempt that may or may not have made it out of the zone. We’ll never know, thanks to an official caught out of position.

Cogliano’s failed clearing attempt sent Cogliano into a fury of some kind as he was handed a ten-minute misconduct for abuse of officials. Given the egregious error on the ice, Cogliano should have been given some pretty serious leeway. Either he wasn’t or he went 0-100 in an instant because no time was wasted in calling him for the infraction.

Vancouver would tie the game about two minutes later when Andrei Kuzmenko scored his second goal of the period. Both goals were in tight as the Avs lost puck battles and coverage around Alexandar Georgiev, who was swimming in desperation to try to cover for Colorado’s porous defense.

Re-enter Toews, whose poise went out the window with his hooking infraction earlier. Back into the action, he bafflingly threw a blind pass up the middle of the ice that was easy pickings for Vancouver’s forecheck. It resulted in another scoring chance that was initially stopped, but Brock Boeser cleaned up the trash and gave the Canucks their third goal in three minutes.

A 2-0 lead melted away and turned into a one-goal deficit against a team that is on the butt-end of any jokes directed at an organization that lacks clear cohesion from the front office down to the ice. The Canucks have made themselves into a laughingstock of a franchise, one that fancies itself a playoff competitor but can’t climb the standings to prove it.

Yet here they were, laughing at Colorado as they skated into the second intermission with a one-goal lead. How would the defending Stanley Cup champs respond?

You could argue we’re still waiting to find out, because the Avs essentially no-showed for the third period. Halfway through the frame, they had just two shots on goal despite getting a power play.

Their most spirited attempt at tying the score came late, but it was never a sustained push and J.T. Miller added a pretty easy empty-net goal with just over 90 seconds remaining in the game to make it 4-2.

It was the second time during the now-five-game losing streak that Colorado had blown a two-goal lead. At least when they did it against the Los Angeles Kings last week, they snagged a point from it. Tonight, it was nothing except more frustration and embarrassment as Colorado’s depth players had nothing to show for their efforts.

Once again, it was little-to-no production from that group (Andreas Englund and Alex Newhook assisted on Girard’s goal) as six (!) of Colorado’s 12 forwards failed to register a shot on goal. Denis Malgin only played 47 seconds before leaving in the first period with an injury (of course!) and Kurtis MacDermid didn’t even hit three minutes played. The rest? Well…fair to wonder what all they were doing out there.

While the Avs finished with 32 shots on goal, 17 came from the top line. That trio also produced 37 (!!) of Colorado’s 71 shot attempts in the entire game. It’s no wonder the Avs are struggling to finish when the other fifteen skaters combine for just 34 shot attempts.

Then you consider the abysmal defense? Giving up 42 shots on goal to the Vancouver Canucks? They gave up 13 high-danger chances to the Canucks in the second period alone!

The officiating did not help the Avalanche, no doubt about it, but the biggest culprit in this latest collapse is squarely on the shoulders of the players in the Colorado Avalanche locker room.

Where is the heart? Where is the leadership? Where is the voice that simply puts a stop to the bleeding and says enough is enough? I know there are some key voices missing from the lineup right now, but there’s an awful lot of championship experience taking the ice every night and not acting like it has any desire to win hockey games.

This looks more like the emotionally fragile group that went 4-5-1 to start last year’s regular season. That group at least had the excuse of the horror show in Vegas fresh in its mind. This one has none of those excuses. Of course it would help if Gabe Landeskog was around, but where are the guys with the “A” on their chest (and I don’t mean the Avalanche logo)?

Where is Nathan MacKinnon’s fire and intensity putting a stop to this? Where is Cogliano setting this team’s mind right and getting them back to playing winning hockey? Where did all the good habits go? Who even is this group? When they look into the mirror, what do they see looking back at them?

Right now, it sure doesn’t look like a team that is serious about defending its championship.