Avs blow another lead late as Blackhawks steal two points

Winning in the NHL is hard. It’s really hard when your best players moonlight as your worst for a night.

We saw that play out tonight at Pepsi Center as Colorado snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in a classic come-from-ahead loss to the Chicago Blackhawks.

I said on the podcast earlier this week that sweeping a divisional opponent in the NHL is hard because teams come in with a lot of pride and determined to make sure their last shot at them counts.

All of that combined for as frustrating a loss as the Avs might have this season as they repeated the mistakes of the Carolina loss 48 hours ago. While blowing a one-goal lead in the final five minutes to Carolina is one thing (Carolina actually being a good team and all), blowing a two-goal lead to the terrible Blackhawks and giving up four third-period goals is quite another.

There were chances along the way for Colorado to blow the game open earlier after scoring the game’s first goal.

Nathan MacKinnon scored but it was waved off after the officials deemed he kicked the puck in. MacKinnon definitely turned his skate but it didn’t look like he really kicked it in but those calls are coin flips anyway. The Avs just lost that one.

Instead of going into the first intermission up 2-0, the Avs only led by one and Jonathan Toews tied the game on the first shift of the second period after a brutal Mikko Rantanen turnover right in the middle of the ice.

From there, Colorado took the game back over and Matt Calvert restored Colorado’s one-goal lead at 2:40. Rantanen missed an open net after he outwaited Robin Lehner as he rang a shot off the post that could have blown the game open early in the second period.

Calvert did eventually give Colorado a two-goal lead when he banked a puck off Lehner’s pads while standing behind the net.

The Avs entered the third leading 3-1 and with plenty of momentum on their side. They got through the first ten minutes of the third period just fine before it all fell apart.

Following a TV timeout, head coach Jared Bednar chose to go away from his strategy of matching Nikita Zadorov against Patrick Kane and went with Ryan Graves and Erik Johnson instead.

This decision proved costly as Kane got free in the offensive zone and beat Philipp Grubauer to make it 3-2 and give the Blackhawks life.

Instead of taking his timeout to try and talk to his team, Bednar just rolled another line over the bench and 28 seconds later Kirby Dach tied the game after Nazem Kadri and J.T. Compher showed near-complete apathy on getting back into the defensive zone to help.

Now in a tied game, Bednar still hung on to his timeout and instead let his team try to play through the self-inflicted adversity.

It did not go well as Chicago scored their third goal in five minutes to take the lead with under four minutes to play. Colorado’s defense was in position but nobody made the play on the puck and Dominik Kubalik got the game-winning goal.

Despite an early pull of Grubauer for the extra attacker, the Avs generated almost no meaningful offensive opportunities (Erik Johnson had one great look but Lehner made the save) and Connor Murphy scored a 195-foot goal into an empty net to seal the 5-3 win for Chicago.

Four standings points thrown away by the Avs in ten minutes of atrocious hockey between their late-game losses to Chicago and Carolina.

Avs will finish their pre-Christmas schedule in Vegas on Monday.

GAME TAKEAWAYS

• Chemistry is a weird thing. We’ve seen it for years with Mikko Rantanen and Nathan MacKinnon in the past. We’ve seen it with Pierre-Edouard Bellemare and Matt Calvert this year. We’ve also seen it with Ryan Graves and Cale Makar. Where we haven’t really seen it is with Nazem Kadri and….pretty much anybody. Imagine building a team and finding all the right fits for roles and players to fill in the gaps you lacked last season and then running into a wall because the players simply lack chemistry. On paper, Kadri was the perfect solution to Colorado’s biggest need but in reality, he’s just been okay, especially recently. Part of the problem is that Kadri hasn’t found any chemistry with Joonas Donskoi or Andre Burakovsky. There was one week early in the season where things looked good but it’s been nothing since. Because the secondary scoring has come from everywhere this year, it’s papered over this oddity a bit but they definitely want to find something a little more consistent on that second line.
• I’m not sure what more there is to say about the Bellemare-Calvert combination. They have simply dominated games for long stretches. If you look at their underlying numbers and fancy stats, they are two of the most dominant players in their roles in the NHL this season. They continued that tonight as Calvert scored two more goals.
• Keep an eye on J.T. Compher on Monday against Vegas. Either a fire gets lit under him after seeing just 6:27 of ice time tonight or the Avs could scratch him completely. He’s quietly struggled in some areas this year and the effort he made on Dach’s game-tying goal is not what you expect from a player with a reputation as a hard-working, two-way forward.
• MacKinnon ended up scoreless for just the seventh time this season. He didn’t seem to quite have the same level of jump as we’ve seen most of the season. He still had his flashes, of course, but couldn’t get one past Lehner that counted.
• This was one of Mikko Rantanen’s worst defensive games of his career. He played a role in several of Chicago’s goals and finished the night with a -4. I’m not a big fan of plus/minus but sometimes it’s pretty indicative of a player who had a terrible night and it certainly did for Rantanen tonight. Combine that with him missing the open net in the second period and this was a game tape for him to burn.
• This was the first game the Avs lost in regulation this season after entering the third period with a lead. There really haven’t been many games they’ve thrown away but doing it twice in a row will always standout. When asked after the game if it was “weird”, Bednar said he would agree with that assessment. Weird is a good word for a team that has been so solid at closing games suddenly blowing two in a row.
• It will be lost in the shuffle but Tyson Jost picked up two points tonight, his first of December, as he ended a nine-game scoring drought.
• I’ve used this space to talk about goalies quite a bit and despite the loss against Carolina, I thought Grubauer played a damn fine game with the goals against not really being much he could do. That wasn’t the case tonight as the Kane goal that got Chicago back into things is one he definitely needs to stop. There were significant defensive breakdowns in front of him on the game-tying goal by Dach but it’s fair to wonder why he was so committed to the initial shot and not at all prepared to push side-to-side to get over.
• It’s not unfair to look at the stop Lehner made on Johnson while Lehner was coming across the crease and come to the conclusion that Lehner made the stop Grubauer couldn’t and that was the difference in the game. Pavel Francouz’s brilliance might force Bednar’s hand for a game or two. The difference between them has been just enough that it, at the very least, should be on the coaching staff’s mind. I still don’t think we’re in a goaltender controversy, especially given Bednar’s overall history of patience with his players, but we’re certainly inching closer if Grubauer continues to prop the door open.