Avs beat Leafs in OT in front of sellout crowd on J.T. Compher goal

He wears his old number, is an American-born player who was an NCAA star, was a bit overlooked in the draft and has a knack for scoring clutch goals. There is so much about J.T. Compher that reminds me of Chris Drury.

Compher’s wrong-foot, wrist shot to the top right corner beat former teammate Calvin Pickard and gave the Colorado Avalanche a big 4-3 overtime win Friday night over the Toronto Maple Leafs at a sold out Pepsi Center.

Compher, who has a reserve about him that also reminds me of Drury, took a feed from Sam Girard (a great play to keep a puck in the zone at the end of a power play that started at the 1:33 mark of OT) and used Alexander Kerfoot’s screen to win a game the Avs nearly let slip away.

“Great screen by Kerf, good to get a win,” said Compher, whose goal was his seventh and kept the Avs at 6-3-1 in their last 10 games. “Obviously, we wanted to finish that off in regulation, but we stayed with it.”

The Avs got a three-point night from a brilliant Nathan MacKinnon in beating Toronto, a goal and two assists. MacKinnon nearly got a fourth in OT, but he got iron on a shot before Compher finally finished it.

The Avs keep beating really good teams at home, while having trouble against the dregs of the league. Make no mistake, Toronto is a really good team that should get better with as much youth and skill as it has. But the Avs probably deserved the win in the end, even though Toronto outshot them 16-9 in the third period and 34-28 overall.

“I liked the way we played tonight, a lot,” Jared Bednar said. “I thought we were a focused group, a determined group. I know they answered back a couple times, but it didn’t seem to rattle our team at all.”

Toronto tied it 3-3 on a James van Riemsdyk goal, with Pickard off for the extra skater, at 18:05 of the third. The Avs sat too deep in a box, which allowed Toronto’s skill forwards too much time and space to make plays with the puck. Toronto also possessed the puck almost exclusively for the first 90 seconds of OT, but when MacKinnon broke up a play at the blue and had a step on the field going the other way, Toronto’s Connor Brown was forced to haul him down, drawing an interference penalty.

Toronto coach Mike Babcock was furious over the call, but it was the right one.

“I was gonna be on a breakaway, so he had to kind of get in front of me,” said MacKinnon, who moved into ninth overall in NHL scoring with 43 points. “There’s calls that go both ways. I guess I’ll take it.”

The Avs had a 2-1 lead after Mikko Rantanen’s tie-breaking goal in the second period, extending his point streak to eight. He finished off a forecheck-steal-pass from linemate Nathan MacKinnon. But Patrik Nemeth helped give the lead away minutes later when, with plenty of time and space to make a play from his own zone, he passed it down the boards all the way for an icing violation.

The Maple Leafs won the ensuing faceoff, cycled the puck a couple times and got a gift goal when Roman Polak’s shot perpendicular from corner to the goal line somehow slipped past Semyon Varlamov. Nemeth didn’t have to handle the puck as much when he had Tyson Barrie as a partner, so this is Exhibit A of how Barre’s absence is hurting right now. Nemeth did make up for it with some better play the rest of the way, though.

Kerfoot finished off a great Avs offensive sequence to get the lead back early in the third, however. Nathan MacKinnon took a lead pass from Barberio, curled back into the zone, fed a pass to Nikita Zadorov, who fed Kerfoot alone in the right circle. The rookie from Hah-vahd put the puck far post, top shelf.

Toronto got a point, but the Avs got two. That’s how this game felt like it should end, and that’s the way it did end.