Avalanche finds their way to another loss to Blue Jackets despite another late lead

Eyes versus analytics. Heart versus mind. Confidence versus doubt.

Right now, the Avs are deeply involved in all of those battles and, at least from the peanut gallery’s seat, losing two of them.

It was a good analytics night for the Avs. I was genuinely surprised to see what all the postgame numbers ended up being. Giving up 22 scoring chances and 10 high-danger chances at 5v5 felt pretty close to accurate.

The 30 scoring chances and 15 high-danger chances they created certainly didn’t seem to track with what I remembered seeing but then a highlight reel of Nathan MacKinnon missing an array of Grade-A scoring opportunities played through my mind and it made more sense.

Blowing yet another third-period lead against the Columbus Blue Jackets, this time Colorado failed to salvage a point in a desperate comeback and lost the 4-2 game they deserved earlier in the week in Denver.

There’s no sugarcoating this week – it was a disaster for Colorado. The upstart Blue Jackets are an early-season surprise as one of the NHL’s youngest rosters keeps finding their way to victories with a solid identity built on hard work and opportunistic finishing. It’s a simple formula.

On the other side, the Avalanche also has a simple formula. They play a decent game, get a lead, immediately go into a shell about having the lead and worry so much about making a mistake that they make several over and over again until the lead is gone, then feel sorry for themselves until they’ve lost the game.

Rinse, repeat.

For a 4-5-1 hockey team, it’s pretty doom and gloom around here. Expectations are high, certainly a whole hell of a lot higher than what they’re currently living up to. This looks more like the 2017-18 team that didn’t take off until shortly after Matt Duchene was traded.

Well, Duchene is in Nashville now and the Avs don’t have any distractions to blame for their long stretches of poor play. They have flashes of the team we’re expecting to see, and without them having their full lineup even once this season there’s a legit caveat here, but even despite the absences the players making the most money are among the ones struggling the most.

Mikko Rantanen recorded six shots on goal in his return to the lineup tonight but has just five points in seven games. He hasn’t scored a goal since Colorado’s second game of the season.

Likewise, MacKinnon sits on just one goal through eight games and is both missing and passing up the opportunities we’ve seen him regularly turn into goals the last three years. He had just two goals through the team’s first 12 games last year and then scored 18 in the final 37 to get his numbers back to a more normal level so it isn’t like this has never plagued MacKinnon before.

The reality, however, is last year’s Avalanche could afford for MacKinnon to find his goal-scoring touch. It was a deeper team, especially at forward, and a stout defensive squad that was comfortable winning a low-scoring game if it needed to.

At least so far, that just isn’t this year’s club.

It needs more from MacKinnon and Rantanen. It needs more from Sam Girard, who despite snagging an assist tonight badly misplayed the game-tying goal from Columbus in the third period and has continued his disturbing trend of being on the ice for an awful lot of goals against even if his underlying numbers aren’t bad at all.

It’s a club searching for everything, from identity to confidence and everything in between.

They don’t look comfortable in their own skin. The hope is the team is just in that awkward teenage phase where they don’t understand all the changes going on emotionally and physically and they’re just trying to survive until things make sense again.

Unfortunately, the Avs have a finite amount of time to do all of that soul searching. From a standings perspective, they’re the same distance from the bottom where previously-winless Arizona finally got in the win column as they are to the division-leading St. Louis Blues with an identical six-point split.

That’s concerning. There are still 72 games to play so let’s not pretend a six-point deficit in the standings is an insurmountable task. It’s obviously not.

But until this team really figures out who it is and how to be the best version of themselves more than not, that six-point deficit has a chance to actually turn into a legitimate mountain to climb.

It gets late really early in the NHL.

If there’s a switch, it’s time for Colorado to flip it.

TAKEAWAYS

• Eh. I don’t have a lot from this one. It feels like a different side of the same bad hockey coin. Effort isn’t consistent, execution is downright bad. On the other hand, Darcy Kuemper was great for most of this one. I didn’t love the game-tying goal because I’m not sure what he’s reading there but my real problem was with how Girard played it. Beyond that, I thought Kuemper was awesome and lived up the lofty billing he had received coming into the year.
• Devon Toews made his season debut and I thought he was fantastic. He was a little off on some of his timings, especially offensively, and it looked like there was just a touch of rust with the puck but beyond that I thought he was great. Bowen Byram was, too, and if Cale Makar can get back quickly, just maybe the Avalanche can find some protection in the lineup so Girard can find his way through some of his early-season struggles.
• Colorado’s entire bottom six flat-out sucks right now. The ones who can be better need to be and the ones who can’t need to be jettisoned to a place where they can hone aspects of their game. Darren Helm taking multiple penalties is inexcusable as the steady veteran in that group. When you’re supposed to be the adult in the room, you can’t take the crayons and color on the gd walls.
• Good to see the real Andre Burakovsky for a few minutes there. That second goal was just awesome.