Lethargic performance plagues Avalanche in sloppy loss to Capitals

The Colorado Avalanche dropped one of the most boring hockey games you’ll ever see to the Washington Capitals. The score might have been 5-2 but the pace and quality of play was that of an 11 PM men’s league game on a Sunday night.

The call it “sleepy” would suggest more credit than it would deserve. If we’re being honest, the only excitement of this game was that Justus Annunen gave up three goals on six shots and all three were bad goals so there was an element of surprise there.

Annunen’s tough showing gave way to Trent Miner, who was called up after it was announced earlier in the day that Alexandar Georgiev was day-to-day with an upper-body injury. An injury was just what the Avs needed after getting as healthy as they had been all season, so at least we’re back.

Anyway, that was great for Miner because it was his NHL debut. He entered when the game was 3-1 in the second period, watched Nikolai Kovalenko score to make it 3-2 and things almost got lively. That died down shortly after when Jakob Chychrun came right down the pipe and ripped one past Miner’s glove to make it 4-2.

The game was slower than the car Jake Paul entered the arena in before his fight against Mike Tyson, and that car was barely moving. Shots on goal finished 20-19 with the Caps finally getting to the 20th shot on their empty-net goal with two seconds remaining. Riveting.

Tonight was supposed to be a coronation of sorts, a celebration of three Avs players returning to the lineup at the same time. Val Nichushkin was making his season debut after being reinstated following his suspension in the playoffs last year. Jonathan Drouin played in his second game of the year and, oh yeah, Miles Wood returned to the lineup after missing a few games.

The increased help of Nichushkin and Drouin alongside Casey Mittelstadt showed promise sometimes, but ultimately nothing really stuck as the game wore on. Parker Kelly got his first goal of the season and assisted on Kovalenko’s goal, so that was nice.

Here’s the game flow in terms of the shot chart:

And here’s the heat map of shots:

Avalanche Observations

• All jokes about how slow this game was aside, both teams were really good defensively. There were only six high-danger chances at 5v5 between the two teams, three aside. The Avs had 22 scoring chances to Washington’s 12, but you can look at that heatmap above and see that very few were in tight. It was a tightly played game in the defensive zone and had there been better goaltending from both teams, this had the makings of a 1-0 kind of game.
• This was a disaster for Annunen. None of the three goals he allowed are quality goals. Two of them were from distance and he had clean sightlines on both. The third was a mess from Sam Girard and Josh Manson, but it wasn’t a high-quality finish. He loses his angle and gets beat by a soft backhand. With Georgiev finding his game the last week, Annunen couldn’t afford to have a night like this if he was trying to show the organization he deserved more time in the cage. An awful night for him.
• Of the three guys returning, Nichushkin looked the best to me. He had that skating burst that makes him special but he was hard on pucks and didn’t show much rust at all. He showed good chemistry with Casey Mittelstadt, too, and that’s a combination I’d like to see get tried for a while.
• Mikko Rantanen was awesome two nights ago and I thought all of the things I loved about his game were gone tonight. He was tentative with the puck, deferring to linemates and creating very little quality along the way. When he had chances to unleash his wicked one-timer, he flubbed them. I didn’t like anything on the offensive side of the puck from Rantanen.
• Nathan MacKinnon, same thing. This was his worst game of the season by a mile. He wasn’t dangerous with the puck or without. He had two shot attempts the entire game. Two! They weren’t even shots on goal! This was karmic balancing from last year’s four-goal game against the Caps, I’m convinced of it.
• Some games are just worth forgetting. We can bin this one tomorrow after I go through the tape and put together the Avalanche Studs and Duds for y’all.