Avs-Flames Game 78 Studs & Duds

The Colorado Avalanche secured their fourth President’s Trophy in franchise history following a 3-1 win over the Calgary Flames. These were the Avs studs and duds.

Studs

Martin Necas

Necas had a fun three-point game where we saw his game-breaking ability on display but the empty-net goal by Nathan MacKinnon was actually my favorite part of Necas’s night. It’s obviously a dumb goal (ohhh, we’ll get there), but it was the forechecking aggression from Necas where he attacked the puck carrier, caused a problem, and then his skill took over as he made the play.

That’s the stuff we don’t see often enough from Necas, but when he commits to it, he’s effective. We’ve seen several goals this year created when he got hit with the inspiration to start forechecking hard. He’s good at it when he actually does it, and I’m forever going to be hopeful that we see that part of his game begin to develop more and more.

Anyway, his goal is the goods. It’s a nice play to get the puck to Nathan MacKinnon, whose one-touch back to him was awesome, and then Necas dances everyone in the middle of the ice, outwaits Flames goaltender Dustin Wolf, and deposits the puck into a wide-open cage. It was the best.

Three points on the night put Necas at 98 points for the season and he’s on the cusp of a 40-goal season after scoring his 38th. It’s the type of season we were all dying to see from him after the landscape-altering move to acquire him last January. He’s given the Avs everything they could have wanted in his first full season as an Av.

Nathan MacKinnon

Let’s be real. MacKinnon’s goal is the most unethical nonsense you will ever see. The Avalanche were feeding him pucks to try to get him a goal as he tries to stave off Montreal Canadiens sniper Cole Caufield in the race for the Rocket Richard Trophy as the league’s top goal scorer on the season. MacKinnon’s teammates were far more interested in it than MacKinnon himself seemed to be, because he passed on multiple opportunities with the empty net and the one he finally nabbed was the ickiest way he could have scored it.

Of course, none of that matters. The Avs needed that goal because they were getting way too cute for their own good and MacKinnon’s goal ended that nonsense. The rest of MacKinnon’s night was fine, though.

He snagged two primary assists on great feeds, first the cross-crease pass to Gabe Landeskog for the backdoor tap-in play that we have very rarely seen for the Avalanche this season (especially on the power play!) and the second one was the one-touch pass to Necas on his goal. That’s a good night’s work. He was still going about 50% and his usual lazy nonsense when he’s going for a line change was extended a few more feet.

MacKinnon is in full-blown “cardio workout” mode. He’s getting in his steps but it’s obvious his heart isn’t really in it.

Naturally, he had a three-point night in a game the Avs scored three goals. What a freak.

Mackenzie Blackwood

He got a little bailed out by the offside challenge going Colorado’s way to take Calgary’s second goal off the board, but this was exactly the type of game that Blackwood needed. Relatively drama-free and he stopped 28 of 29 shots on goal.

He wasn’t tasked with a particularly difficult evening but he still stopped seven of the eight high-danger chances that got to him. It was the perfect kind of game for a goaltender whose results have been trending in the wrong direction for the last two weeks. He needed a good performance to help get his confidence going as they head into the postseason.

Blackwood may not start Game 1 for the Avalanche, but he’ll take the net at some point if the Avs have a lengthy playoff run. They’re going to need him and this might have served as the kind of “get right” game he needed against one of the league’s bottom-feeding teams.

Duds

Whatever the hell that was with the empty net

As mentioned above, the Avs were dedicating the majority of their time against Calgary’s empty net to trying to force the puck to MacKinnon, except when Val Nichushkin missed another empty net because, apparently, he only likes scoring against goalies.

It was way, way too cute and was frustrating to watch. We all understand what was happening, but they deserved to lose the lead with the way they were acting. It was dumb and silly and an offside challenge was the only thing that bailed them out of watching their two-goal lead dissolve in a matter of minutes against a team that is actively trying to ice a losing squad in hopes of chasing down some draft lottery luck.

This kind of cutesy stuff is something that occasionally plagues this Avalanche squad. They get a little high on their own supply and stop doing the right things. MacKinnon himself had a few different looks at it and was trying to force the puck to teammates instead of letting it fly. Why? Why not just continue doing the right stuff and seal the game?

From the coaching side, why is Jared Bednar trying to force it so much that Logan O’Connor, Joel Kiviranta, and Parker Kelly didn’t touch the ice at all during that sequence? Those guys are among your defensive stalwarts and are always on the right side of the puck precisely because they do all the little things at a high level. They should be a big part of trying to close out the game and instead were spectators to them trying so hard to feed MacKinnon.

The whole thing was frustrating and indicative of a team that has lapses of focus and drifts into trying to play for more selfish means instead of being wholly committed to the end goal of winning. All’s well that ends well, but it was dumb.

Avs Unsung Hero

The President’s Trophy

The bigger picture is that the Avs clinched the President’s Trophy, securing home-ice advantage throughout all rounds of the playoffs. Every year, the team that wins the President’s Trophy becomes a cursed entity doomed to be remembered for a fun regular season that is ultimately meaningless in a sports world completely overrun by “ring culture.”

If you don’t win the championship, nothing else matters. The last six months have been meaningless, right?

I struggle to subscribe to the theory but maybe that’s because I don’t want to look at the world in such a binary manner. The journey has always been the destination for me, so I guess I’m just a millennial hippy who is happy to enjoy the moment that I’m in because every time I blink, I find myself in a new moment that is different from the last and gives me something different to feel and appreciate.

Losing sucks, yeah? The entire endgame of building a sports team is to win a championship. We all accept that. It will certainly feel like a letdown if the Avalanche were to only walk out of the MacKinnon-Makar era with one Stanley Cup, but that lone Stanley Cup is still more than the Winnipeg Jets, Columbus Blue Jackets, Minnesota Wild, Seattle Kraken, Utah Mammoth, Buffalo Sabres, Nashville Predators, Ottawa Senators, and San Jose Sharks have ever won. That’s nine of the NHL’s 32 teams that have never won the Cup.

Another eight have not won a Stanley Cup since the turn of the century. That’s half of the league that hasn’t experienced the ultimate joy. Is their existence meaningless? It’s an existential question that is a moving target for all of us to decide for ourselves.

This leads me back to the President’s Trophy. The NHL is the only league of the big four team sports in North America (MLB, NFL, NBA) that awards a prize for being the best team in the regular season. It was introduced ahead of the 1985-86 season and has only been won by 18 franchises. Of those, only nine have won it a single time.

Quick napkin math tells me that means that 14 teams have never won it and 23 haven’t experienced it multiple times. With the Avalanche clinching last night, it is their fourth win in 30 seasons in Colorado (remember the missed season due to a lockout; it would be 31). That’s the second most ever behind (ugh) the Detroit Red Wings.

Winning the President’s Trophy doesn’t mean the Avs are going to also win the Stanley Cup; “only” eight have ever won the Cup and it hasn’t happened since the 2012-13 Chicago Blackhawks. It also doesn’t mean they’re cursed; the Stanley Cup is the hardest trophy to win among the big four North American team sports, after all.

What it absolutely, undeniably means is that this has been a special regular season and I hope we all find it within ourselves to enjoy what a ride it has been. With four games remaining, the Avs sit with 114 points, third-most in franchise history. The two teams currently ahead of them were the 2000-01 (118 points) and 2021-22 (119 points) teams. Both won the Stanley Cup.

What happens this postseason will be its own piece of history. This is the moment we’re currently in, so let’s try to enjoy it.