Avs-Capitals Game 48 Studs & Duds

Studs

Colorado’s stars

There are not a lot of words when the Avalanche star players turn up the wick and dominate a team as they did tonight.

Nathan MacKinnon had four goals and an assist. The first 2,174 Avalanche games featured zero four-goal games. MacKinnon has two in the last 16 games. The assist was nice, too.

Mikko Rantanen was part of the fun in assisting on MacKinnon’s goals and had a five-point night of his own with the opposite scoreline of MacKinnon with a goal and four assists.

Cale Makar had another ho-hum three-point night but started it off like a madman when he scored the first (regular season) shorthanded goal of his career.

All of those guys had more points than the Capitals scored goals. When you get nights like that from your top guys, it is very hard to lose.

Alexandar Georgiev

Colorado’s “other” All-Star has been searching for his game despite playing damn near every game and the quality of his play has been a hot topic of debate for the majority of this season.

Tonight, Georgiev was excellent to begin the game as the Avalanche were the ones searching for their game and he was the backbone of the team as they worked their way into things.

He came up with several huge saves, including one post-to-post save on a Washington power play that kept the game at 0-0. This bought time for the team in front of him to figure it and once it did, it was smooth sailing for Georgiev after that.

His teammates spotted him a four-goal lead halfway through the game and he took it from there. The Caps managed to snag a couple of goals in the third period to keep Georgiev from having an excellent statistical night, but he was key in getting the Avs through the one truly rocky stretch of this game.

This was easily one of his better games in 2024.

Special teams

The Avs had a 3-0 advantage in special teams as they opened the scoring with Makar’s shorthanded goal and then scored on their only two shots on goal on their first two power play opportunities when MacKinnon fired similar one-timers after elite setups from Rantanen and Makar.

Their penalty kill has been bleeding goals for a while now but tonight that unit stepped it up and not just with the SHG. In 8:08 of 4v5 time, the Avs actually equaled the Washington PP in scoring chances at 3-3, were only outshot 5-4, and barely had an expected goal advantage of .55 to .51.

That’s a good way to win a hockey game.

Duds

Penalties

In a 6-2 win where the Avs controlled the game for so much of the contest, it is squarely on nitpicks at this point to get me through this section. I don’t think any Avs players were really bad and there wasn’t a section of their game that struggled a lot. They were fantastic.

So I’m going with two first-period penalties that could have changed how this game unfolded. I still haven’t seen the Miles Wood slashing call and Jonathan Drouin got called for the rare and kind of hilarious high-sticking that started in the armpit of Nic Dowd and came up from there.

Whatever the case, the Avs had the first two penalties in a 0-0 game in the first period. A goal by the Caps in either of those situations could have changed the course of this game.

Unsung Hero

Artturi Lehkonen

He missed 35 games and stepped back into the lineup as if he had never left. Jared Bednar mentioned Lehkonen would likely not get to his normal 20 minutes and that held as he only got to 16:12 but made an impact throughout.

Andrew Cogliano was the original disrupter of the peace on Washington’s second power play but Lehkonen helped push the puck back in the neutral zone and then it ended up on Makar’s stick, who did the special things after that.

Later on, an excellent save by Charlie Lindgren robbed him of a goal but it was classic Lehkonen stuff as he went hard to the net and made the goalie make a save. With no Val Nichushkin around, adding Lehkonen back into the mix gives them one more player not afraid to go hard to the net and force opposing teams to defend that area of the ice harder than they otherwise would. That’s a huge component of his game and value to the Avs.

We saw a little of everything from him tonight. It rules seeing him back out there doing his thing.