Kadri hurt as Avs steal one on the road to take 3-0 series lead

Alright, before we get started on the game itself, I’ve gotta give some love to the folks here at Rogers Place. This building is amazing. State of the art top to bottom, and absolutely beautiful in every sense of the word. Literally everything you’d want in a hockey rink, I couldn’t be more impressed.

Really the whole city of Edmonton, very smart and passionate hockey fans. Coming into downtown for the airport you saw support for the hometown team everywhere. As a “hockey guy” at heart, it’s really fun to see a city that is dedicated to hockey through and through.

Alright, on to what actually happened in the game,  as the Colorado Avalanche knocked off the Edmonton Oilers 4-2 to take a commanding 3-0 series lead. But first, as has been the case far too often recently we need to talk about an injury that occurred just minutes into the game.

Less than 40 seconds into his first shift, Nazem Kadri was hunting down a puck low in the offensive zone when he was cross-checked forcefully from behind by Evander Kane. The hit sent Kadri hard into the wall from about four feet out. Just an incredibly dangerous play.

Kadri stayed down on the ice for close to a full minute before finally sitting up under his own power. He left the game and did not return and it was confirmed by Jared Bednar after the game that Kadri will be out for the remainder of this series “if not longer”. A massive loss for the Avs. 

As for Kane, he received a five-minute major penalty but was not tossed from the game. I’m sure the Department of Player Safety will at least take a look at the play. 

I was honestly a little confused when they announced the penalty because I was always under the impression that if you handed out a major penalty for boarding it was automatically accompanied by a game misconduct. So I reached out to someone who would know to get some clarification. 

What I found out was that boarding majors are one of the few calls that are not automatic when it comes to game misconduct. The only time it is an automatic game misconduct is if the hit causes an apparent injury to the head or face.

While Kadri did leave the game with an injury, it wasn’t immediately obvious that he wouldn’t be able to return. So the refs got together and deemed that while it was a dangerous play worthy of a five-minute major, it did not warrant an automatic ejection. 

Right, wrong, or indifferent, that is the rule and by the way it’s written I do think the officials applied the protocol correctly in the moment. With the benefit of hindsight, now knowing Kadri is injured, it’s easy to say they got it wrong, but they can only make decisions with the information they have at the moment. 

Again, I’m sure the league will look at it. Let’s get into what went into Colorado’s 4-2 victory. 

We heard all week about the big energy boost that the Oilers were going to get from the home crowd. How the energy inside the building would propel them to the start they needed to get into the driver’s seat in this game. 

To be fair, things started really well for them. I don’t know how much of it was the crowd necessarily, but less than 40 seconds in Connor McDavid took advantage of an awkward bounce off the official, was able to corral the puck and skate in a mini breakaway. As you can probably guess, Connor McDavid doesn’t miss many of those. 

It was 1-0 Oilers, and the building was jumpin’. 

It was only 38 seconds later that Evander Kane put Kadri into the wall from behind and earned every minute of his five-minute major, and it really sucked the life out of the building. 

The Avalanche didn’t score on the power play, but they controlled the puck in Edmonton’s zone for almost the full five minutes. It was this really weird moment where both team’s momentum kind of canceled each other out. 

On one hand, the Oilers killed a five-minute penalty so they had to feel good about that. On the other, the Avalanche spent five full minutes with the puck on their sticks and were really able to start getting into a rhythm.

Obviously scoring would’ve been the best outcome for the Avs on that man-advantage, but it honestly kind of worked out for them regardless. The crowd had somewhat come out of it with Colorado really starting to press. 

It was a chaotic start, but both teams really did start settling into the game as the first period was winding down, and right when you thought the Oilers were going to escape into the locker room with a lead, Val Nichushkin got rewarded for doing the right things in the offensive zone. 

First of all, I thought Mike Smith was the Oilers’ best player tonight. The irony in that statement is that the goals he gave up were… not great. If not for some acrobatic saves though, the final tally for the Avs probably could’ve been 7 or 8. 

After making several huge saves to keep his team in the lead, Mike Smith couldn’t track down an attempted centering feed from Nichushkin. It bounced off him on the short side and fell into the net. The Avs were off and running. 

It was a total gut punch. The game was tied at 1-1 in the first period, but you felt the entire building sag. Edmonton players and fans all just dropped their heads. 

I was actually seated next to the evening’s EBUG (emergency backup goalie) in the press box, a (semi) local goaltender who was in the building for over half of the Oilers games this season. He made a comment to me as the second period was getting started that Rogers Place didn’t have the same energy it normally did. 

We both remarked that it felt tense, despite the tie score and two full periods to play. 

Well, it got even tenser four and a half minutes into the middle frame as Val Nichushkin added his second of the night on somewhat of a broken play. 

A Devon Toews shot from the point hit a body in front of the net and fell right into the slot. Nichushkin skated through and snapped it on net as soon as he touched the puck. It looked like it hit another body in front and went in.

The Avs really came alive once they had the lead and started to lock things down defensively while continuing to push offensively. As Jared Bednar says, safe is death. 

After such an eventful first, the lone Nichushkin goal was really the highlight of the second and set the stage for an exciting third. Errr well, it had the makings to be an exciting third, but Colorado’s goal was to make it “boring and gross”, as Nathan MacKinnon put it postgame. 

I gotta say, for most of the period, that was exactly what they did. I remember looking up at the clock as we crossed the 15-minute mark of the period and thinking “wow, there is nothing going on for it being a one-goal game.”

It looked like that was what we were in for the rest of the way, but as we’ve talked about all series with these two teams… they don’t need much to make something happen. 

Ryan McLeod skated out of his defensive end, through the neutral zone and right down the middle of the ice. He snapped one high over Pavel Francouz’s glove and the crowd erupted. All the nervous energy was released (for about five minutes), and we suddenly had a tie game with just barely more than 10 minutes left. 

To make matter worse for the Avalanche, just minutes later J.T. Compher was chasing Leon Draisaitl down on the wall and got his stick tied up in the German forward’s feet. The Oilers had the momentum, the crowd was into it, and they were headed to the power play. It smelled of disaster for the Avs. 

Enter Pavel Francouz. 

A couple good looks early in the man-advantage, but nothing super threatening. Right as the power play was getting near its end, a blocked shot spit out to Francouz’s right and directly onto the stick of McDavid, who was staring at a wide-open net. 

Francouz made a desperation push and got his glove up to literally steal a goal right out of the air. It was maybe the biggest play of the night to that point. 

Moments later, the Oilers threw a shot on from out high that got the outside of the post. The Avs won a loose puck battle, and just tried to blindly clear the puck. 

I thought they had maybe missed an opportunity, Compher was stepping out of the box right when the penalty killers got possession. Still though, Compher had a step and just straight up out muscled Evan Bouchard in a race to the puck. He literally created his own breakaway. 

With just over seven minutes remaining in regulation, Compher fired one low that just overpowered Mike Smith and tricked into the net. The Colorado bench exploded, and the air left the rest of the arena. Amusingly, the last player to notice the puck had gone in was Compher himself.

Mikko Rantanen added an empty-netter with 30 seconds remaining, but nothing the Oilers did felt threatening up to that point anyways. 

Look, this wasn’t Colorado’s best game. They didn’t do anything with their power plays, and it took them a while to get things going at 5-on-5, but they found a way to scrape this one out. 

They have preached a full team effort, and the “next man up” mentality all season, and tonight it earned them a 3-0 series lead. 

Their toughest test is ahead, trying to close out a team in the Western Conference Finals.

They know they’re going to get Edmonton’s best, most desperate game, and we’ll get another glimpse into what this team is really made of.