Studs

Artturi Lehkonen

A new career-high with a four-point night, Lehkonen has been overdue for some good fortune with the pile of scoring chances he’s been involved in so far this season and tonight the universe course corrected and gave Lehkonen what was owed.

It was all very familiar for Lehkonen, too. His first point of the night came late in the first period when he dove to move a puck along the wall to Nathan MacKinnon. The rest of that play is great work from other players, but it starts with Lehkonen’s high-end puck retrieval ability and then willingness to go all-out to move it.

His goal came from standing in front of the net and cleaning up a rebound. Then he picks up assists with a perfect centering feed behind the net and then battles in the offensive zone after a faceoff win. It’s all hard work all the time.

Lehkonen is consistently elevating his linemates because the puck plays through him so well. It’s why the more skilled guys love playing alongside him. This four-point night is the direct result of all the little things he does well coming together for a huge night.

Ryan Johansen

Johansen scored a power play goal for the second straight game and both goals had the shared characteristic of Johansen going to the net and making himself available to make a play.  The one tonight I loved because it exemplifies Johansen’s feel for the game, which has always been one of his better and more nuanced traits.

He understands that Lehkonen is on the other side of the crease battling to create traffic in front and instead of leaning into an analogous objective, he found the soft spot in Carolina’s defense and put himself in position in case MacKinnon feathered a puck through traffic. That’s exactly what happened and a 1-0 deficit turned into a 1-1 tie with just five seconds left in the first period.

He picked up the primary assist on Lehkonen’s goal when he kept it simple and shot the puck. It turned into a rebound which got put into the empty net and gave the Avs a 4-3 lead. It wasn’t anything special, but very effective.

The other aspect Johansen has brought to Colorado is winning faceoffs in important situations. J.T. Compher handled an enormous amount of that load last season and despite his reputation, he finished with a 48.8% win rate. After winning 13-of-23 draws tonight, Johansen sits at 57.7% for the season.

Certainly more importantly than his overall success rate, Johansen won all three draws on the penalty kill and won 5-of-6 on the power play. Those are the situations where faceoffs matter the most and he was dominant in that role. This is what the Avalanche envisioned when they nabbed him.

The fourth line…again

Take everything I said from this piece after Colorado’s immaculate win over Chicago and drop it here. Logan O’Connor scored yet again on the penalty kill for the third straight game (he now has six career shorthanded goals and half of them have come in the last week) but there was the added bonus of Fredrik Olofsson scoring a great goal of his own.

O’Connor doesn’t do anything particularly special on his goal tonight. He reads the play, gets on his horse, and uses his excellent skating ability to outrace the Hurricanes through the neutral zone. Look where O’Connor is relative to the far-side forward when Andrew Cogliano gets the puck.

Here’s where O’Connor ends up when he shoots.

This is the power of speed and why the Avalanche relish players who have it. There isn’t anything about the play that is special; O’Connor was just faster and worked harder and then finished with the opportunity he created. It’s simple but hilariously effective hockey.

As great as O’Connor’s goal was, Olofsson’s might have been a little more important in terms of the game’s outcome. The Hurricanes had just scored twice to erase the 2-1 lead the Avs got when O’Connor scored and all of the momentum was back with Carolina. A great play by Bowen Byram to reverse the puck up the ice quickly turned into an opportunity for Olofsson (also some great board work by O’Connor).

Olofsson walked into the offensive zone with a ton of space and an abbreviated 2v1 opportunity. He guarded the puck from being taken by the defender on his hip (who was never close enough to make that play anyway but Olofsson couldn’t have known that, of course), then drifted into the middle of the ice to improve his shooting angle and keep the defending Brent Burns having to play the pass. Olofsson then quickly changed his hands and stick and flicked a perfect shot up high for his first Avalanche goal.

It was a great moment for Olofsson to get his first goal for his adopted hometown Avalanche but it also flipped that momentum back to Colorado, who exploded to build a 6-3 lead from that 3-2 deficit.

The power play

I’ve been critical of this unit at times already this season but they scored three goals on five chances. They were all very different, too, as the first one came with a sense of urgency as the power play began with under 20 seconds left in the period, the second one came off a dazzling zone entry by Cale Makar, and the third was Mikko Rantanen throwing a puck at the net and the goaltender not picking it up.

The third one is more about the poor play by the goaltender than anything Rantanen really did but it all still counts here. Four goals on special teams with the shorty takes an awful lot of pressure off your team at 5v5 to produce a lot. That helped. Just like that the Avs are 8th in the NHL on the PP.

Duds

Bowen Byram

Byram made a nice play for the assist on Olofsson’s goal but he struggled in a lot of aspects of his game. The majority of that is stuff a team can live with. Guys go through peaks and valleys in their games all the time, especially defensemen who are still short on games played in their careers. It’s all part of the growing process, especially for a talented guy such as Byram.

The penalties, though, are totally out of hand right now. Tonight was his third multi-penalty game of the season. He currently leads the league in minor penalties with seven. It’s been five games! He has penalties in four of them! He alone accounts for 28% of Colorado’s minor penalties this season!

There was plenty of concern about a guy like Miles Wood coming in who has had a penchant for penalties in his career and even a holdover such as Josh Manson, another guy who can be penalty-prone, but Byram has been on quite the pace so far. He even surpassed his sophomore season’s PIM total (he only played 30 games, but still) with the four minutes he picked up tonight.

For a player as mobile as he is, he hasn’t been moving his feet very well and that’s leading to him getting out of position a bit. When that leads to him chasing, he’s getting into some trouble. We know he is significantly better than what he’s shown so far this season so there’s no reason to panic or anything, but this is an ugly stretch for the kid.

Alexander Georgiev

Georgiev had allowed just four goals in four games coming into this game. It doubled in one night.

I’m kidding about him being a dud; it would be hard to fault him too much on two of the Carolina goals and it takes a little bit of stretching to get on him too hard for the other two. Must be nice for him that on a night when he isn’t incredible, he still gets the win.

Unsung Hero

Cale Makar

It was a quiet night for Makar despite adding another two assists to his name and becoming the franchise record holder for most multi-assist games by a defenseman (the Avs defenseman scoring record book is just going to be a Makar biography, it seems). His second assist was pretty ho-hum stuff but his first one, my goodness gracious.

MacKinnon has a lethal ability to bring the puck into the zone with control, especially on the power play, and that specific skill is something the Avalanche have leaned on heavily in recent years. We’ve seen teams try to adjust to that by attacking higher up in the neutral zone to keep MacKinnon from getting such a head of steam built up.

This has left a little additional space for Makar, who is usually the guy to drop the puck to MacKinnon and then head to his station in the middle of the ice as he waits for the magic to happen. That adjustment by teams, especially the wildly aggressive PK of the Hurricanes, meant Makar saw an opportunity to do it himself, took it, and then once he got into the zone, made a pretty special play to keep control of the puck as he danced into the middle of the ice.

He used that new position to force the Carolina PK to collapse harder onto him, which opened space for everyone else. The result was the pass to Johansen, who fired it on net and created the rebound that Lehkonen smashed home. Just great stuff.

Makar is one of the very few defensemen in the NHL to have a quiet two-point game that gets overlooked but that’s the curse of a high-scoring team around him, I suppose.