Detroit, shock city; Avs' late blitz beats Red Wings

Joel Quenneville, when he coached the Colorado Avalanche, always used to say, “If you don’t score on your 5-on-3, you don’t win the hockey game.”

For about the first 54 minutes of Sunday’s Avs game in Detroit at (this will never seem right in saying) Little Caesar’s Arena, Coach Q’s old bromide looked as big a lock as anything said this century. The Avs fumbled, bumbled and stumbled their way through their first five power-play opportunities against the Red Wings, including a failed two-man advantage of 48 seconds in the second period.

The Wings, meanwhile, took a two-goal lead into the final few minutes of regulation after a Niklas Kronwall power-play goal.

Then, it was the Yak and MacK attack.

Nail Yakupov scored a….power-play… goal to cut Detroit’s lead to one, then Carl Soderberg redirected a Nathan MacKinnon shot past Jimmy Howard with less than a minute to goal and Jonathan Bernier off for the extra skater.

Then, MacKinnon came down the left wall, into the left circle, and blasted a wrist shot past Howard.

Your final from Little Caesar’s: Avs 4, Red Wings 3, OT.

Yakupov’s goal broke a 0-for-11 streak of power-play futility and, more important, it ended the mounting anger and frustration you could see in the faces of frustrated Avs players. After that, the Avs really dominated the play territorially and got the reward when Soderberg deflected MacKinnon’s shot, from the left circle, in off his pants.

The Avs, who outshot the Wings 37-24 and outhit them 25-18, overpassed and overcomplicated things all day before that. Good things, like deflections in off a guy’s pants, happen when you put pucks on net and don’t think too hard.

Howard had no chance on MacKinnon’s game-winner. It was pure smoke off the forehand wrister, in the back of the net before Howard could barely move his glove.

It was MacKinnon’s final, special delivery to the people at Little Caesar’s and Motown.