If you were only kind of paying attention to the Colorado Avalanche obliterating the Calgary Flames to the tune of a 6-2 win on Tuesday night, you might have only seen Mikko Rantanen having a four-point night and the top line dominating another game.
Rantanen, up to 88 points on the season and now fifth in the NHL in scoring, might be riding the world’s quietest shotgun alongside the Hart Trophy pursuit we have seen from Nathan MacKinnon this season. Add in a revitalized Valeri Nichushkin back in his second game since returning from the player assistance program and you have what would seem like a ho-hum night of Avalanche hockey, the kind of game we’ve seen time and time again over the last six years.
Sure, MacKinnon and Rantanen were dotting the box score and the top line was the story of the night. That’s going to happen a lot more in the future, too, because hey, those guys are two of the 15 best forwards in the world.
But if you look just one line down on the scorecard, you’ll see something that has happened occasionally but not nearly often enough this year. That’s a second line that was dangerous and productive. Too often this year, the Avalanche has had to settle for a Ross Colton-led line of creating chances but not cashing in. The Ryan Johansen experiment was such a failure, they paid to make it go away.
No, new acquisition Casey Mittelstadt was brought in straight-up for Bowen Byram, a high-risk gamble by the Avalanche that they have solved the center spot behind MacKinnon not just for this playoff run, but for the next several years, too. Mittelstadt is only 25 and is pushing for back-to-back 50-point seasons, a breakout that began in Buffalo last year and continued through this season despite the major struggles of the talented but inconsistent Sabres.
I kept a close eye on Mittelstadt throughout this game and he was an interesting watch. Defensively, it looks like he needs to be coached up in a lot of areas of the game. He’s still finding his way in Colorado’s system and all of that is understandable, but he wasn’t acquired for what he does in the defensive zone.
When the Avs met earlier this year to have their meetings and set up their list of priorities for the trade deadline, they decided the try to aggressively pursue an option that would be for beyond just this season. Adam Henrique is a quality veteran player having a good year with former Colorado Eagles head coach Greg Cronin, but paying a first-round pick just to have to solve the problem again in the summer didn’t sit well with the Avalanche front office.
Once they decided it was time to try to find a multi-year answer at 2C, the question became about what archetype to target. A more defensively-oriented player who could take tough matchups but wasn’t an offensive dynamo, a la Seattle Kraken center Yanni Gourde, or a player known more for his offense than defense who could find a new level with Colorado’s rush-based offensive attack and high-end skill, especially on the defense.
The Avs landed on Mittelstadt as a target. His time in Buffalo appeared to be coming to an end with the Sabres having made long-term commitments to Tage Thompson and Dylan Cozens as their centers for the present and future and Mittelstadt would require a hefty raise this summer. It was all there for the Avalanche to pounce.
They did just that and dealt Byram, a young defenseman who was blocked from truly breaking out in Colorado. They added Mittelstadt’s skill to the middle of the Avalanche lineup and the potential seemed like it could be a good deal for both teams.
For now, I don’t care about the Byram-Buffalo part of this. I hope he crushes it out there, but getting back to tonight, you saw Mittelstadt’s potential all over the place. Colorado’s top guys destroyed Calgary and built up a 4-2 lead mostly on their own. It was clinical, as it usually is, and then you saw a glimpse of what could be coming.
You see, Mittelstadt had failed to score on a 2v1 rush up the ice earlier in the game. The normally pass-oriented Mittelstadt called his own number but failed to beat Dan Vladar on the blocker side from the right side of the ice. Vladar shut him down, but Mittelstadt kept driving that new-look second line to scoring chances.
They broke through when fellow newcomer Brandon Duhaime made a brilliant touch pass to a streaking Mittelstadt following a killer stretch pass from Devon Toews. Mittelstadt broke in on the left side of the ice and tried Vladar on the blocker side again. This time he beat him cleanly with a quick snapshot that was in and out of the net in the blink of an eye.
It moved the game to 5-2 so it wasn’t a big goal in the outcome of the game, but it showed the kind of skill the Avs got in Mittelstadt. He had a tough first game against Minnesota as he was trying to figure everything out on the fly, but tonight we saw what the Avs saw when they targeted him at their organizational meetings several weeks ago. The skating, the hands, the patience.
By the end, Mittelstadt had played 13:46 at 5v5 and the Avs outshot the Flames 9-5 in those minutes. He had an expected goals for percentage of 60. Instead of the Avalanche waiting for MacKinnon’s line to get back on the ice, there was another center pushing play in the right direction. He will get a much bigger challenge tomorrow night with the Vancouver Canucks.
It’s always easy to dismissively wave it all off as only one game, one goal, one shift, one whatever. It’s true that if you continue drilling down deep enough, you can wave off anything as a small sample. But the funny thing about those small samples? They tend to grow.
The Avalanche are hoping this is the beginning of a much larger sample of excellence from Casey Mittelstadt, a player who now owns a sizable portion of Colorado’s renewed Stanley Cup aspirations.
