Avs deliver a message to the rest of the league with a sound beating of Minnesota

In the same way that when a team gets blown out and you don’t want to make too much of how a team looks at its worst, you also have to be careful about making too much of how a team looks at its best.

I covered the 2016-17 Avalanche from beginning to end. I was the only local media member to do so. Every day I was around that team. I remember when they played well, I would think “Okay, this is a competitive team. Why can’t this team show up like this more often?” As the year progressed, I learned those nights were the ones where that squad was at its best, the apex of what that group could accomplish together.

It was good enough to win a couple of games that year (22 of them, in fact). But looking at what the best the Avs have to offer this year? We just saw it tonight in Colorado’s 5-1 shelling of the Minnesota Wild. You know what it looked like?

Watch any montage in any Rocky movie. The stuff getting hit? That was the Wild tonight. They were the speed bag and the Avs were Rocky.

This was an important game, too. While the halfway mark is more symbolic than meaningful from a standings and big-picture perspective, the two teams came in nearly identical across the board. All that separated them was a single point in the same number of games played. The two teams had even scored and given up the exact same number of goals.

The narratives surrounding the clubs couldn’t have been more different, however. Minnesota was a team expected to compete for the fourth spot in the West Division. Lacking high-end centers and proven goaltending, Minnesota’s success to this point has been seen around the league as a charming story of a team fighting its destiny.

On the other end, an Avalanche club that had been a slight disappointment until very recently. Two teams that have been on-again, off-again rivals as they oscillated between relevant and rebuilding.

A game that meant just a little more than the typical regular-season game, especially given the importance of head-to-head results in a division-only playoff format.

That is the game the Avs and Wild walked into tonight.

It was a statement game and the headline coming out of it reads “Wow!”

This was as one-sided a game as you will ever find in the NHL. There are plenty of games where poor goaltending leads to blowouts in games that were otherwise relatively evenly played. Tonight, however, was not that kind of game.

This was the kind of game where a goaltender plays pretty well, makes fifty saves, and is an afterthought because the five goals that got by him ended up as much the story as the 55 shots he faced.

Colorado’s 6-2 loss earlier this year to the San Jose Sharks sent a message to the Avs: They couldn’t get by on talent alone and they had to re-dedicate themselves to doing all the little things right.

The Avs have gone 7-1-1 since that loss. They’re now in second place in the division, just one point ahead of Minnesota. They sent their own message to the Wild tonight. How Minnesota responds Saturday may go a long way towards determining how serious they are in competing with Vegas and Colorado for the West Division crown.

It might be making too much of tonight’s game, but how can you not be extremely impressed? If that’s Colorado at its apex, there isn’t a team in the league that can handle that.

For the visual representation of what a beatdown looks like, I present:

TAKEAWAYS

• Despite the recent run of absolute dominance in shot share, the first period the Avs laid on Minnesota in this game is the unicorn of ass-kickings. 2-0 with a 25-6 shot advantage and it could have easily been more like 4-0. The pace and energy they played with were unparalleled this year. They knew this was an important series and their last matchup ending in a 6-2 loss on home ice certainly had a little something to do with it. It was the perfect storm and wow was it an incredible display and I’m not even exaggerating or trying to sell you on it. Pretty fitting that all the Avs were missing was a few more goals to really drive home how lopsided the period was. That’s okay. The rest of the game did the trick.
• Incredible performances from all of Colorado’s top line. Mikko Rantanen’s four points extended his team-lead to 34. He is now tied with five other players for the eighth-most points in the NHL this year. His two goals moved him to 16 on the year, now tied with Kyle Connor for fifth in the NHL. Goals in four straight games for Nathan MacKinnon. If he’s finally going for real, Vegas is in trouble.
• I said on Twitter that Kirill Kaprizov is a magician. We’ll have to see what tricks he has Saturday afternoon because his only one tonight was the disappearing act he pulled when the Wild needed him most. Tonight was a good reminder how tough the NHL is and how even the most electric rookies are going to run into walls when good teams gameplan to remove them from the equation. Kaprizov tonight? 1 SOG in just under 20 minutes of ice time.
• Absolutely hated seeing what happened to Matt Dumba, who lost an edge and crashed into the boards. He immediately looked like he knew something was wrong and had to be helped off the ice by Ryan Suter as he didn’t put pressure on the injured leg. Hoping only the best for Dumba, who suffered a similar freak injury earlier this year against the Avs.
• Tonight was fun but I wonder if it was just a little too fun for Colorado. This is a team that has occasionally gotten a little overconfident after big wins and you know the Wild are embarrassed about what just happened. I expect Minnesota to come out playing a heavier game on Saturday and it will be interesting to see how Colorado responds when the Wild start to try to bully them a little bit. It’s been a sore spot for the Avs in the past and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Wild came out with that kind of aggressive mentality. That’s a proud group that’s going to want to send a message right back to the Avs.