Takeaways from Avalanche's latest loss: Nothing going right anymore

Don’t really know how to say it any differently right now folks. It’s ALL just falling apart for the Colorado Avalanche right now. This team just can’t win a game anymore.

Nine days of rest and relaxation only served to make the Avs look more sluggish and inept, in a critical home game Saturday night against the Vancouver Canucks. The Avs are officially out of the playoff pack in the Western Conference, two points behind these Canucks, who scored on two of their first three shots en route to victory.

It’s clear the Avs need a change of some kind. Mixing the lines up isn’t working. Mixing the defensive partners isn’t working. And, no matter who is in goal these days, that’s not working either.

But other than maybe dealing a Tyson Barrie or maybe Nikita Zadorov for a forward, that’s the only truly big thing I can see happening before the Feb. 25 NHL trade deadline. Everybody can just FORGET about Joe Sakic trading that Ottawa pick or their own first-round pick or Cale Makar or Conor Timmins or any other top prospect for veteran help. That’s not going to happen. Nor, should it. Those picks, along with Makar, represent the vehicle by which the Avs will get themselves out of this mess eventually.

They are also not going to be firing Jared Bednar anytime soon. I can promise you that management doesn’t think he is the problem right now. Is there more pressure on him and can weird things happen to coaches in the NHL? Sure. But everybody can stop tweeting me asking whether Bednar will be the sacrificial lamb right now. The answer is no.

By far my biggest worry about the team, right now and for the near-term future, is the state of the goaltending. Semyon Varlamov wasn’t awful Saturday in this one – he made saves on two breakaways in the game’s first 30 minutes, and two of the first three goals were more to blame because of defensive breakdowns in front of him – but he’s just not a difference-maker anymore these days.

I went up to Varlamov afterward, and, like always, he faced the tough questions and made no excuses.

“It’s hard to answer the question, of what’s going on. I have no idea,” Varlamov told BSN Denver. “I think we’re playing pretty good, to be honest with you. It’s not like we’re going out every game and not creating any scoring chances. I think we’re creating scoring chances, but we just cannot score. We’re giving up lots of goals every game. I can tell you, I have to be better. One hundred percent. I have to be more consistent every night. I have to be better.”

If this team has to now go out and find another goalie, or draft one and develop one, that’s a huge worry that none of us anticipated entering this season. If you’re stuck with bad goaltending in this league, it can take years to get out of it. I’m still not ready to write off Philipp Grubauer, but there’s no question his first year in Denver hasn’t gone the way management hoped and expected.

The forward depth just keeps getting further and further exposed as the season moves along. The Avs DO need to make some moves to bottom six – hell, maybe the bottom nine – forward group. You can’t get rid of everyone, nor should they. But they most definitely need to do something about the forward depth. With Cale Makar joining this team possibly as early as a couple months from now, I think Barrie being moved is the most likely, most logical move that will happen before the deadline. It’s not a reflection on him – and the Avs damn well better make sure they get a proven forward for a point-a-game-or-close-to-it offensive defenseman like him.

In the meantime, a few more of my takeaways and observations from this game:

• Within the game’s first 90 freakin’ seconds, the Avs were already giving up 2-on-1s. The first goal of the game, by Vancouver’s Jake Virtanen, largely came about after Avs D-man Ian Cole pinched way up in the offensive zone and the puck was chipped over his head to Antoine Roussel, who had Virtanen on his left up the ice, down the right wall. His partner, Erik Johnson, tried to block the crossing pass, but it was a perfect one to Virtanen. Cole should have known better to pinch that deep without knowing he could get a stick on the puck.
• Count me as one person who didn’t like the pregame line combos on the top six. Nathan MacKinnon centering a line with Alexander Kerfoot and Colin Wilson just didn’t work. Carl Soderberg centered a line with Gabe Landeskog and Mikko Rantanen, and that didn’t work either. Just keep the top three together and sink or swim with them.
• A failure of hockey analytics was exposed in this one, regarding Barrie. Natural Stat Trick had Barrie with 22 Corsi events for and 12 against in the first two periods. Those who only look at a spreadsheet might conclude he was really good in those two periods. But he made some really bad mistakes that cost his team in those 40 minutes, including yet another instance where he mishandled a puck at the blue line on the power play, leading to a breakaway by Loui Eriksson that Varlamov bailed him out on. I’m not an anti-analytics guy, but this game just isn’t a good one to determine things strictly by numbers like those. (Barrie was a minus-2 in the periods, but, I know, I know, plus-minus is just terrible).
• Matt Calvert’s goal that cut it to 3-1 really was appreciated by the crowd, desperate to cheer anything these days. But then Varlamov allowed another long shot to somehow elude him, and that was pretty much that. Once it became 4-1 late in the second, a lot of fans started to hit the exits.
• I think the season will hinge on this next three-game road trip, starting Thursday in Washington, continuing on to Brooklyn against the Islanders and finishing up in Boston. Avs will have only 28 games left after that trip. Still a decent amount of time, yeah, but if they come out of that trip something like six or eight points back of a playoff spot, it’s going to be lights out I think. Too many other teams to leap over probably. On the other hand, some kind of unexpectedly good trip, and they can take this thing down to the wire still.
• Chins up. It’s just a game.