Avalanche embrace duality of greatness and stagnation in frustrating loss to Flames

Sometimes it’s really fun to cover this Colorado Avalanche team. They’ve been a thrill ride dating back to last year when they eeked into the postseason with the thinnest of margins and gave the Nashville Predators way more than most of us believed them capable of.

Then the Avs came out blazing hot to start the year with back-to-back impressive home wins over Minnesota and Philadelphia, two teams who should be pretty competitive this year. The egg they laid in Columbus was followed up with a beatdown of the lowly Buffalo Sabres. Things were looking up. The Avalanche had responded to a disappointing loss by beating up on a bad team, something they’ve really struggled with in recent years as their tendency to play down to their competition had always set in.

Through the first two minutes and 40 seconds of tonight’s tilt against the Calgary Flames, it was all good vibes. Colorado had rocketed out to a 2-0 lead, Flames head coach Bill Peters had burned his timeout to try to calm his jittery team down and the Avalanche responded by trying to live up to their name and bury the Flames. They nearly did, too, as the Tysons, Barrie and Jost, came oh so close to providing that dagger of a third goal that likely would have put Calgary away on this night.

Instead, the little bounces didn’t go their way and the Avalanche showed their age and packed up shop and called it a night. The Flames slowly and methodically took over the game and the final two periods were a full-blown domination. Avs head coach Jared Bednar hit it right on the nose in his postgame presser when he admitted his club was lucky to have walked away from tonight with a point at all.

And that’s really the rub with this group right now.

One moment they’re blazing up and down the ice, creating scoring chances out of thin air in a way muggles shouldn’t be able to and the next they’re chasing the puck and lacking any semblance of confidence. It’s maddening watching a team this young finding their way through the NHL equivalence of puberty. So many of the Avs are in the infancy of what could be lengthy NHL careers and the consistency that comes with the mastery of the NHL grind too frequently eludes this youthful collection.

But the players aren’t the only ones still finding their way. Tonight was a reminder that while Bednar has hit many of the right notes as the conductor of this era of the Avalanche symphony, he too is learning on the job. Tonight was an excellent example of how a coach who has a refreshing approach to young talent (he actually plays them in meaningful roles!) can still get bogged down falling in love with the devil he knows.

As was the case last year when he had the Matt Nieto/Carl Soderberg/Blake Comeau trio to heavily lean on down the stretch in games the Avalanche were leading, Bednar turned to Nieto, Soderberg, and Gabriel Bourque to try to hang on to the lead. It’s easy to sit in the cheap seats and second guess a strategy that clearly didn’t work but on a night where only his top line was producing any kind of positive result, he turned to the lowest-ceiling trio to try to secure the two points.

It’s no wonder, then, when every time the Avalanche tried standing up in the third period they simply banged their head.

Repeatedly.

Then they got to overtime and it looked Bednar was struggling with the demons of last year when his team lacked cohesion throughout the lineup in the wild west of the NHL’s manic three-on-three format. He has speed throughout his forward corps and a young defenseman in Sam Girard who he even labeled as a future superstar just a week ago and he opened overtime with Nathan MacKinnon, Erik Johnson, and Tyson Barrie.

That’s your superstar center with the most reliable two defensemen the Avalanche have had for many years and even on paper, it’s a questionable tactic. Mikko Rantanen and Gabriel Landeskog were Colorado’s best forwards alongside MacKinnon and neither played a meaningful second in the extra frame. Girard’s only appearance was trying to chase down Johnny Gaudreau from behind after he was already clear for the game-winning breakaway. A coach’s responsibility is to put his team in the best position to win and it’s reasonable to ask if Bednar did that with his Avalanche tonight, both late in the game and in overtime.

If there’s one thing you can definitely say about this Avalanche squad, it’s they’ve largely taken on the personality of their head coach. In many ways, the slow heartbeat and never say die attitude has served this group well, especially when facing the perseverance of coming from behind. But what was so painfully obvious tonight is neither coach nor team has figured out the art of winning at the highest level yet.

From the explosive offense early and exceptional goaltending throughout to the long stretches of chasing the puck and the undisciplined penalties that helped get the Flames back into tonight’s game, the duality that is the Colorado Avalanche was on full display. Just five games into an 82-game season, the Avalanche have found themselves looking into a mirror and not knowing what is looking back at them.

They leave Monday for another road trip out east. It would be a damn good time for them to figure out which Avalanche team is the one that comes back home.