Studs

Bowen Byram

In a sea of poor play from the Avalanche, I thought Byram was one of the few guys who had it going pretty well. The goal he scored two nights ago looked like a major confidence boost and I thought we saw some of that carryover into this game.

He was robbed twice by Tristan Jarry but put himself into scoring positions and was one of the few Avalanche players who showed a consistent willingness to shoot the puck throughout the game.

Byram also added one of the very few physical elements on the evening as he threw his weight around a bit on top of playing a respectable two-way game. It was the hope that the Islanders game would be something for him to build on and I think he did that. If he can use tonight to take a step forward on Sunday in Buffalo, the Avs could really be cooking on the blueline.

Jonathan Drouin

Drouin has yet to score a goal this season but he has had some very good scoring chances and Jarry slammed the door shut on what could have been a multi-point night for Drouin. As the rest of the Avs were struggling to get going, Drouin found himself at the center of plenty of the action for Colorado.

You’d love to see him actually bury one, of course, but it feels like he’s getting closer and closer with him finding the soft spot in Pittsburgh’s defense multiple times and getting some really good scoring chances for himself while also creating some good looks as well.

As with Byram, this should be something for a struggling player in Drouin to build from and I hope he uses it as a springboard against a defensively-weak Buffalo squad to finish the road trip.

Duds

Pretty much everyone else

I don’t really know what to say beyond saying that basically the rest of the Avs roster was not very good tonight or downright bad tonight. Ghastly mistakes by Sam Girard, Mikko Rantanen, Josh Manson, and Nathan MacKinnon led to the four Penguin goals and three of those completely hung Alexandar Georgiev out to dry. The one goal I’d pin on Georgiev is the fourth goal, and by that point, so what?

The rest of the team wasn’t any better. Cale Makar looked like he was allergic to keeping the puck on his stick as he inexplicably lost control of it time and time again. Some of it can probably be attributed to what appeared to be choppy ice, but certainly not all of it.

Colorado’s stubbornness is a double-edged sword that turned inward in this game because the more they struggled to make the kind of high-level plays with the puck that they are capable of, the harder they pressed to make those plays instead of trying to simplify their game and take what was in front of them. The two players who best did that are the ones listed in the Studs section above, especially Drouin.

Hockey is often defined by its entropy and the team that best corrals the game and brings a sense of order to the ongoing chaos is typically the one that prevails at the end of the night. The Avs didn’t even come close to it. They were bad at 5v5, they were awful on the power play (though they did create a couple of nice chances eventually) as it went 0-for-5 and the four-minute power play they had at the end of the second period was a last chance to really climb back into a competitive position in the game and they didn’t do anything with it.

I mentioned to Rudo tonight that sometime this season the Avs will have another poor game where they only generate ~22 shots on goal and lose in uncompetitive fashion and it will still be better than tonight.

They were awful, plain and simple.

Unsung Hero

Valeri Nichushkin

I feel compelled to put somebody in this spot but tonight there really wasn’t a very good candidate. I’m going with Nichushkin because for stretches of this game he was the only Av who was hard on pucks and digging, even if it wasn’t leading to anything good.

He struggled when he actually had the puck as he tried forcing way too many pucks through traffic for scoring chances. This was especially frustrating when he had clear shooting lanes but was trying to make the extra pass. Early in the game, I mind it less because it’s a guy trying to make a play and get the team off on the right foot.

With the game continuing and the Pens adding to their lead, it was got increasingly frustrating to watch. He did calm it down and started shooting some, but he remains with a single goal this season.