Avs ride dominant first period to easy Game 1 win over Predators

“Can Nashville summon their very best often enough in a best-of-seven to steal the series from the heavy favorite Avalanche?

It’s a very tall mountain to climb, and, well, this is the Avalanche. The mountain just might come down on top of them before they can get there.”

That’s how I finished my deep-dive series preview between the Nashville Predators and Colorado Avalanche.

I also said on yesterday’s preview podcast I thought the Avalanche were going to come out like gangbusters and blow the Predators away with a dominant first period that would end at 3-0.

It turns out I didn’t give the Avalanche enough credit in what became a 7-2 final score.

That’s because Colorado got to that 3-0 mark, but at the 8:30 mark of the first period when Andrew Cogliano scored a short-handed goal.

Instead of the game slowing down from there, Colorado kept its foot on the gas and ran Nashville and backup goaltender turned starter David Rittich right out of the game with two more goals before the opening frame of the series could come to an end.

Rittich was pulled in favor of Connor Ingram, who played in the fourth NHL game of his career tonight. The final tally was a 5-0 scoreline with a 18-6 shot advantage.

Colorado became the first team in NHL postseason history to score a goal at even strength, on the power play, and short-handed in the first 10 minutes of a game.

The stars for the Avalanche showed up after taking the last two weeks of the season to work their way through games that didn’t matter at all. Nathan MacKinnon, Mikko Rantanen and Cale Makar all had three-point nights.

Colorado also got goals from Cogliano, Devon Toews and Artturi Lehkonen. Three of Colorado’s four lines registered goals and half of the defense registered points.

This was an onslaught, a shellacking, a beatdown.

It was a message sent in Game 1 of the series that no Juuse Saros meant open season on whichever goaltender drew the unfortunate task of having to withstand an amped up Avalanche team that was antsy to get the playoffs started and was for the first time all season completely healthy.

Now, the two cons of the game were that Darcy Kuemper didn’t get the shutout and the good health didn’t even make it one full game as Cogliano took a cross-check from Matt Benning (who later got away with a cross-check on Nico Sturm, too) and didn’t return for the third period.

With Logan O’Connor and Alex Newhook the healthy scratches in this game, the Avs are at least prepared to replace Cogliano in the lineup if he can’t go for Game 2. Those are tomorrow’s problems, however.

When trying to find a lot to take from this game, it’s hard to really draw on too much. The Avs were up 2-0 within the game’s first three minutes and the dominant start meant head coach Jared Bednar did not have to play any of his tactical hands in terms of matchups he liked.

The chess game didn’t even get started because the Avs put their foot all the way down on the gas pedal and blew the Predators out in what was basically a freebie Game 1 win.

For all the talk about the Avalanche struggling through the last two weeks of the regular season and coming in against a Predators team that had “already been playing playoff hockey”, when the actual playoffs got started it sure looked like one team was ready for the moment and the other team was the Nashville Predators.

This was Colorado’s reminder that when going right, they are among the very best teams in the NHL. You might have been able to argue that nobody needed that reminder more than the Avalanche themselves, but they’ve seemed plenty confident in their ability to turn up their play when pushed all season long.

Game 1 of the series is over. If there’s ever a franchise that knows that a dominant Game 1 win doesn’t automatically mean a free pass to the next round, it should be the Avalanche. A similarly dominant win over Vegas last year in Game 1 didn’t lead to anything other than, arguably, overconfidence and complacency.

It’s on the Avalanche now to combat that as they head into Game 2. Once again, though, tomorrow’s problems.

For today, well, they waited all year to get another shot to prove themselves worthy of Lord Stanley’s Cup. They’re one win closer to the ultimate goal. That was today’s objective.

Tomorrow it starts all over again.

TAKEAWAYS

• I don’t have too many real thoughts on the game because it got so out of hand so quickly. I will say that Nashville’s reputation as a team that wants to attack physically and make life miserable from that standpoint is well-earned. They lived up to that today but the Avalanche held their own just fine and didn’t get too wrapped up in the silly stuff. The only penalty that “hurt” them in those situations was when Josh Manson got the additional roughing at the end of the second period, but given the game situation, I have no problem with Manson stepping in and helping remove Nazem Kadri from that position.
• Darcy Kuemper wasn’t asked to do a ton but 23 saves on 25 shots is just fine, especially when the two goals given up were a puck that bounced through multiple players and onto the backdoor where he didn’t have a chance and the second goal was a clean breakaway where he just got beat by a quality move.
• Matt Duchene putting up points in Ball Arena while his team gets badly beaten? Where have I seen this before?
• The real series starts on Thursday in Game 2 but I really was impressed tonight with Colorado’s depth. Again, the game got out of hand quickly enough that I don’t think you can make too much of the matchups and such from this game, but Colorado’s depth guys went almost exclusively against Nashville’s depth guys and the Avs dominated those matchups.
• Mattias Ekholm used to be one of the league’s best defensive defensemen and one of my favorite defenders to watch in the NHL but he got absolutely housed tonight. I haven’t paid as much attention to him as I did in previous years but I was a little blown away at just how badly the Avs took advantage of him in particular tonight. I think Colorado has a major advantage against guys like Matt Benning and Alex Carrier but Ekholm needs to be a factor in this series if the Preds are going to compete. He was brutally bad tonight.