Avalanche offense misfires in shut out by Vegas

Two fun facts we learned about Jayson Megna coming into tonight’s game: He grew up in Cameron’s house from “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and his father-in-law is Jim Craig.

Unfortunately for the Avalanche, those fun facts were pretty much the end of the fun tonight as Colorado’s return to play fell flat in a 1-0 loss to Vegas. Marc-Andre Fleury’s 30 saves were enough for his second shutout of the season.

For the Golden Knights, they snagged two wins in two days after beating the Sharks in San Jose yesterday and then traveling home to take on the Avs.

When Lester Bangs talked about “seeing them again on the long road to the middle”, I imagine this is kind of what he was on about. The Avs and Golden Knights, considered to be two of the league’s Stanley Cup favorites, met for the first time in a national television appearance that should have been a ballyhooed affair.

Instead, it was like watching toddlers who can barely walk try their hand at boxing. Some chances were traded but ultimately it was a disjointed mess and the one shot that landed was the difference.

Colorado’s rust and the Vegas fatigue smashed headfirst into a battle of mediocrity that I don’t expect we’ll see from them again. In their short history, this has been a series of blowouts and high-scoring affairs, not punchless papercutting befitting a team from California.

It was the first of the four-game series these two teams will play over the course of the next eight days, highlighted by the Saturday tilt outdoors at Lake Tahoe.

Games played are a mess but the 1-0 result puts Vegas in first place in the West while the Avs remain tied for third with Anaheim. They sit six points behind the Golden Knights with just one less game played, so this series is pretty important.

TAKEAWAYS

• It absolutely sucks that Sam Girard’s ironman streak for the Avalanche ended due to being on the COVID Protocol List. His streak of 231 consecutive games played is second in Avalanche history for a defenseman only to the 285 straight games played by Martin Skoula. For a guy of Girard’s stature, it sucks that this is the first thing to keep him out of a regular season game since he became a regular after being part of the Matt Duchene trade.
• Cale Makar also missed the game with an upper-body injury. His absence was noticeable, especially as the team struggled to apply pressure from the back end. The lack of Makar and Girard was a double-whammy on a night where the Avalanche offense came up snake eyes. Jared Bednar said Makar could return to the lineup as early as Tuesday.
• Look, the rest of the defense was…pretty questionable on paper. The only Avs regular from a year ago was Ryan Graves, who might have had his strongest game of this season. It was an imperfect performance from that group but they did a decent job on the whole. Toews was a steadying presence and predictably played a ton but Bowen Byram also saw 23 minutes on ice and outside of Dennis Gilbert, no D played less than 19 minutes. There were a lot of good looks from each of Timmins, Graves, and MacDonald with also some bumps in the road. A solid showing against a formidable opponent, though.
• That interference call on Conor Timmins is nothing short of nonsense. He establishes himself in place and simply stands there. He glances back to see Roy coming but there isn’t a single rule in place that states Timmins isn’t allowed to stand there. That’s all he did and Roy skated into him. That’s the referee doing a horrible job, not Timmins doing something he shouldn’t. Atrocious whistle there.
• So much rust from the offense. The Avs were okay in this one but I thought they acclimated well to how Vegas was playing. They weren’t the run-and-gun Avs we see so frequently and I think that was important to note. They still lost, so detractors and simply point to the bottom line and say “nothing else matters”, but that’s a pretty good Vegas club and the Avs ran with them without Landeskog, Makar, and Girard. Those are three high-impact players and the Avs still held their ground. As long as we see a more ‘normal’ Nathan MacKinnon and Co. on Tuesday, this will go next to the John Gibson game as “great job by the opposing goalie!”
• Philipp Grubauer looks great. He had to be big early and he rose to that task. The Pacioretty goal was, to me, a great shot from one of the league’s most consistent goal scorers over the last half-decade. He just keeps producing.