Brutal effort in Ottawa brings back the anxiety to Jared Bednar and Avs fans

OTTAWA, Ontario – Just when I thought I had something figured out with this team, just when I dared to say this team had some momentum on which to build, just when I dared to predict that prosperity was just around the corner for this team again, the Colorado Avalanche went out and just stunk up the ice at the Canadian Tire Centre Wednesday night in their worst performance of the season.

We aren’t just back to Square One again with this team, folks. We’re at Less Than Zero. The Avs showed tonight that what happened the other night in Toronto was just an aberration, that overall they’re just not a very good hockey team right now. After a lazy, incompetent, shockingly brutal 5-2 loss to the last-place Ottawa Senators here, the Avs fell to 2-8-2 in the last 12 games.

Am I overreacting? I don’t know, maybe. But, wow, that was not what I expected to see tonight. Who is the lottery team, anyway?

The Senators, whose first-round pick this year Colorado owns, thoroughly dominated the Avs. Absolutely dominated them. To say the Avs were soft in this one would be an insult to goose feather down. The only checks that seemed to matter to Avs players tonight were ones that say “Pay to the order of…”

Wasn’t this an Avs team that was supposed to have been fired up again after that comeback win in Toronto? Wasn’t this supposed to be a team that really wanted to finish up this cross-country Canadian road trip with a win, then take that five-hour flight home in happy comfort? Wasn’t this supposed to be a team that had a little extra motivation, because of that Sens’ first-round pick and all?

Guess not.

Maybe the scariest thing of all for Avs coach Jared Bednar: It seemed like he’d thought his team had turned the corner the other night too, that there could be no way it could play a game like this so soon afterward. He wore a stunned look while facing the media. I asked him: Does it worry you, as a coach, when you don’t really know what you’re going to get, effort-wise, from your team?

“Yeah, of course. Absolutely. No question,” Bednar said. “If we’re competing the way we need to compete, then sometimes you get the results and sometimes you don’t. I feel like we’ve been getting a little bit of bad luck lately and you’re hoping that a game like Toronto turns it around. But the effort part of it’s gotta be there first. Tonight, the breakdowns were effort-based.”

More than anything, Bednar looked like the disappointed parent, having just caught his kid smoking pot after promising to buckle down on his grades. Or something like that.

“Just not ready to play tonight,” Bednar said. “Way below average road trip. Didn’t get the results we wanted. Play was below average. Can’t take nights off.”

What did Avs players have to say for themselves?

“We talked before the game about how it wasn’t going to be easy. You can’t look at where they are in the standings and expect to have an easy game,” Erik Johnson told BSN Denver.

But that’s exactly how the Avs seemed to think it would be, that they’d just have to come into the Canadian Tire Center, throw their sticks on the ice and that would be enough to spook the lowly Sens. Instead, the Avs watched as Senator after Senator did all the hustling, hard-working things and they didn’t. Before you knew it, it was 2-0, then 3-0, before the Avs got a token goal to make it 3-1, then let up again.

The capper to this night of absolute misery for the Avs, of course, were two goals by Matt Duchene. On his birthday, just a few days after his first child, a son named Beau, was born, Duchene had all the time in the world to grab a rebound off the back boards and put a shot past a beaten, beleaguered Semyon Varlamov close to the midway mark of the third that made it a 4-1 game.

“I think we were ready to play, but I think it was just (lack of) execution,” Johnson said.

But Bednar said there was no effort, and that’s what had him so mystified.

“You can’t be coaching effort. It’s almost February,” Bednar said. “If the effort’s not there, for whatever reason…there’s nothing else to it. You can’t look past that. That’s a prerequisite to everything else.”

The puck support that was there in abundance in Toronto was nowhere to be found further down the Ontarian road here. The Avs couldn’t complete a five-foot pass was roughly the first 30 minutes of the game. They took bad penalties, didn’t go hard to the net, ceded all the ice in front of their own net.

Just a horror show from start to finish. Don’t be fooled by that little mini-comeback at the end, either.

“They came out a lot harder than we did,” D-man Mark Barberio said. “We didn’t take care of the puck in our D-zone and gave them a lot of momentum off of turnovers. I think they took that momentum into the second period, and Varly kept us in it. But we were just flat. Just a flat game from us tonight. We had a late push tonight, but just too late.”

At least this road trip is over. At least they get to go back to home environs, where another last-place team, the Los Angeles Kings, await on Saturday.

Oh that’s right – the Avs already lost to the Kings at home not too long ago.

Who knows what kind of Avs team will show up, or how things will go from here on out.

For Bednar and the Avs and their fans, the fact that nobody seems to know what their identity is right now?

That’s the most worrisome part.