Avalanche stars go dark in blowout loss to Washington

Let’s start this off by collectively taking a deep breath.

The start of this Avalanche season has been nothing short of chaotic. An opening night win over Chicago already feels like a lifetime ago as the Avs have gone through a game with a  partial lineup due to salary cap constraints and then a sequence of not expecting the COVID guys to play and then they all made it to Washington in time for tonight’s game.

Well, physically they made it, anyway.

Mentally, it looked like the team never really showed up tonight and the 6-3 loss to the Washington Capitals probably wasn’t even as close as that score might suggest. If you’re thinking, “AJ, that score doesn’t suggest a close game at all,” then there’s a good chance we are both correct.

Tonight’s contest, despite being 2-2 into the second period, was just never all that close. The Capitals dominated from the hop and the Avalanche played one of their most disjointed and ugliest all-around games under Jared Bednar in years.

Puck management was nothing short of atrocious and the only thing worse might have been the collective decision-making as the Caps racked up a comical nine high-danger scoring chances in the first period. For reference, Toronto led the NHL last year with an average of just under 10 HDSC per game at 5v5. For the Avs to give up nine in the first period is unsightly.

With Nathan MacKinnon back in the lineup, it was fair to expect something positive out of the top line. Instead, they hit the trifecta by getting annihilated in quantity and quality of shots and in goals against as they were on the ice for five of Washington’s six goals. So, that wasn’t great.

Cale Makar played one of the worst games we’ve seen from him in his NHL career, especially in the first period that saw him repeatedly pinching and watching the Caps abuse his choices for odd-man rushes. Outside of Bowen Byram, none of Makar’s cohorts on defense played much better.

Then, the last line of defense was poor Darcy Kuemper, who continued his spotty play from last Saturday’s contest against St. Louis but had significantly less help in front of him this time around. A man under siege, Kuemper looked like it. This was no Alamo and there was no valiant last stand.

Kuemper was beaten perhaps a little too easily but it’s far too difficult to separate the absolutely porous play in front of him from his own disappointing results.

That’s really the rub in this game. Logan O’Connor was arguably Colorado’s best forward. Byram was arguably their best defenseman and he finished with an expected goals percentage of 39.74.

Washington’s best players produced and played like they took this game seriously. Evgeny Kuznetsov scored twice and Alex Ovechkin added an empty-net goal. Were it not for a late-game power-play goal that meant nothing, Colorado’s stars would’ve been shutout completely.

The Avs will be back in action Thursday against the undefeated Florida Panthers. Let’s see if they show up for that one.

TAKEAWAYS

• Blowouts are the easiest (and worst) games to talk about because the formula is so simple: One team showed up and the other didn’t. I don’t really know that there is much room for analysis in this game beyond “wow, almost all of the Avs were actually so bad”
• J.T. Compher picked up a couple more points, both on special teams. His one-man show tied the game in the first period when he picked off a Kuznetsov pass, outraced and outmuscled the Russian forward for position and then popped the puck over Ilya Samsonov’s glove. He snagged the secondary assist on Mikko Rantanen’s late-game power-play goal when he won the faceoff back to MacKinnon, who faked a shot and slid into empty space before finding Rantanen for the one-timer. Like most of his teammates, Compher got obliterated in fancystats (7 CF, 24 CA) but you could tell he was once again engaged from the start of the game. His start to the season (four points in three games) is obviously encouraging after last year when he didn’t reach four points until his 18th game of the season.
• This isn’t a game for me to ding any of the depth guys. Who cares? The best players completely no-showed this entire game. The top line, the top pairing, and the goaltender you’re going to lean on very hard this year all treated this like a preseason game. The great teams don’t string these kinds of efforts together. We’ll see on Thursday a bit of an early-season character test from these guys. Even if they don’t particularly play better, the effort absolutely cannot mirror what it did tonight.
• From a viewing standpoint, I can’t believe every night has turned into a weird search for trying to figure out how to watch this team play. I’m not even getting into the Altitude-Comcast spat, I just mean that the league has somehow made it clear as mud how we’re going to watch games every night. TNT? ESPN? ESPN+? Hulu? The game just…wasn’t on Altitude tonight so it was kind of a mad scramble for a few minutes to figure out what the hell was going on. This feels like an “only in the NHL” kind of moment does the league make a huge leap back into a television partnership with two titans of the industry and completely and thoroughly botch the handling of how to actually watch the freaking games. Like they just somehow forgot. Okay, nationally televised schedules are great. Everyone understands that stuff, but the day-to-day? This is a mess.