Sloppy Avalanche keep finding ways to win

Even though it wasn’t the most dominant win the Colorado Avalanche will record this year, the Avs slogged their way through an ugly 4-1 win against the Pittsburgh Penguins to win the first three games of their six-game homestand.

When I say it wasn’t pretty, just trust me. Or you can read Austin’s tweet here, which was promoting my trade deadline story, that things were messy.

First off, thanks for the compliment, Austin! Second, he wasn’t wrong about how messy of a game this was. I’m three paragraphs in and that’s basically all I’ve told you about the game other than the score, so can we agree that I have properly emphasized what a poorly-played game this really was from the Avalanche?

Okay. Great. Now that we’ve agreed on that, let’s talk about how the Avs built their way to this victory.

Scott Wedgewood stole the show for the Avalanche

You might have heard that the Avs were pretty sloppy in this game and that meant goaltender Scott Wedgewood was under siege for much of the evening. That would be an accurate assessment of the game, so whoever told you that is at least not leading you astray.

Wedgewood stopped 32 of 33 shots on goal, but just as importantly, he stopped 10 of the 11 high-danger shots the Pens were able to get on net. It’s one thing for a team to allow that many high-danger chances in general, but for that many to actually get on net is a sign of a team that was down bad in its own zone. That was certainly the case tonight with the Avalanche, but this is why you pay a goaltender.

Wedgewood was excellent tonight. If goaltending styles were a martial art, Wedgewood’s style would be “Maximum Chaos” because he’s always sliding around and getting wild back there. It’s entertaining to watch but doesn’t always provide you with a lot of confidence. Then he stops the puck over and over and over again. In this case, he stopped it 97% of the time, which is a pretty high number.

When things aren’t going great for the skaters, you need a goalie to step up and meet the moment. Ever since Wedgewood and Mackenzie Blackwood landed in Denver, they have done their part, Starship Troopers style.

Wedgewood was the man tonight and a major reason the Avalanche found their way to two points.

Casey Mittelstadt, game-winning goal?

It’s a weird thing to type, but Mittelstadt scored the game-winning goal tonight on Colorado’s lone power play chance. All of those things are weird individually, but put them together in one instance and the whole thing is strange.

Mittelstadt doesn’t play much on the power play anymore because he’s on the second unit and those guys don’t get a ton of burn these days. He also doesn’t score very many goals because he had 10 goals on the season coming into tonight.

Add in the randomness of the game-winning goal component and you have a really strange confluence of events, but one the Avs needed and one Mittelstadt needed.

He is firmly ensconced in trade rumors as the Avs are again trying to upgrade their second-line center spot as a direct result of Mittelstadt’s, well, middling results this season. That noise has slowly grown into a dull roar around the organization. With that in mind, he made the big play with just 4:09 remaining in the third period. Not for nothing, the feed to Mittelstadt from Val Nichushkin was absurd.

A 1-1 tie turned into a 2-1 Avalanche lead, which snowballed into a 4-1 win on the back of two empty-net goals. Speaking of which…

Artturi Lehkonen, 30-goal scorer incoming?

Last season, Lehkonen played in only 45 games after a scary neck injury sapped him of half of his regular season. He was still quite productive, scoring 16 goals and 34 points in what would have easily been a career-best season had he played through all of it.

This year, he missed the first 11 games of the season as he recovered offseason surgery. He played his 50th game of the season tonight and his two-goal performance put him at 26 goals on the season. I get it, he’s shooting at 23%, which is hilarious and unsustainable and all of that. I get it.

But this was not something I foresaw coming into the season. Lehkonen is up to 37 points already this year and needs just 14 more to catch the career-high he scored in 2022-23, his first full season as an Av. I never saw this guy cracking the 20-goal plateau in Colorado, yet here he is pushing a 30-goal campaign precisely because of nights like tonight.

Lehkonen has found a home alongside Nathan MacKinnon (two assists, no big deal, just another day at the office for the guy chasing an Art Ross Trophy) just standing in front of the net and either picking up trash or sneaking in one-timers from passes from all angles. Lehkonen got one of those tonight for the first goal when MacKinnon one-touched a Makar cycle in front of the net and before the Pens could do anything, it was 1-0 Avs.

Fast-forward to after Mittelstadt scored the game-winning goal and you have Lehkonen getting the kind of good fortune that was previously reserved for Mikko Rantanen. With Rantanen in Carolina (for another three days?), Lehkonen got to eat greedy with the empty net tonight and snagged an insurance goal. Bingo bongo, two more goals for him and two more points for the Avs. Is he the best contract value in the NHL? If you say no, we’re fighting.