"That's the standard of how we want to play every game": Avalanche dominate in shots again but need OT to beat Coyotes

Remember the game two days ago? The 3-2 loss to the Arizona Coyotes despite outplaying them in every facet imaginable?

Tonight’s dominant Avalanche effort was essentially a copy and paste repeat, even down to all of Arizona’s goals being deflected off Avalanche players.

But when you produce games that look like this:

…and that game causes an opposing coach to have a postgame presser like this:

All you need to do is finish.

Cue the Captain.

It took longer than anyone in Avsland wanted but they got the goal to get the two points in a 2-1 overtime victory.

Crisis averted…for now.

TAKEAWAYS

• Hockey is an incredibly complex and difficult game. I would say roughly 95% of games during a season you can go into the film and really pull apart things that go well and things that go poorly to analyze how a result is created. These last two games have been all about the combination of Arizona’s goaltenders and Colorado’s shooters. That’s the beginning and end of it. The Coyotes were incredibly fortunate four times in two games as all of their goals came courtesy of deflections off Avalanche players whereas none of Colorado’s goals were quite so lucky. Tonight’s single goal came off a cross-ice pass that goes off the back of Tyson Jost’s skate and into the net. Jost officially has better puck luck scoring for the other team than his own. Luck is just cruel and unpredictable like that. It was against Colorado two nights ago, it was just enough in their favor tonight. They overcame their struggles finishing just enough to get the two points. The Coyotes don’t feel bad at all about this as they got three of four possible points despite not playing well at all in either game and losing their starting goaltender in the first game. This was almost as well as it could have gone for them. Basically the only thing that went against them was the puck randomly bouncing on Nick Schmaltz late in the third period on his breakaway. Philipp Grubauer did the rest.
• Grubauer faced just 28 shots across two games, the kind of workload that would make him playing every night much easier. He wasn’t asked to do a whole lot but he did have two huge saves in this game on Coyotes breakaways. The goal he did allow there wasn’t a whole lot you’d ask him to do differently, especially since it was well-defended by Jost. The Avalanche are humming along as an elite defensive team right now and that elevates the pressure on Grubauer to stop what little is getting through the cracks. Goaltenders are all about rhythm and I wonder how difficult it is for Grubauer to get into one when he goes right about 30 minutes without facing a single shot on net.
• Nathan MacKinnon’s stat line tonight was a whole bunch of zeroes all the way across in his 24:44 of ice time…except those 10 shots on goal. He didn’t score but my goodness was he all over the place.
• Sam Girard’s life as a top-pairing defenseman is a challenge because of how he plays. He does so much skating during the game that it’s understandable when he begins to tire and tonight it looked like he was wearing down some as he was fighting the puck all night. Naturally, he ends with the lone assist on Landeskog’s game-winning goal. That’s hockey, right?
• There was an area of Colorado’s game that was absolutely problematic tonight and it was the power play. They were trying a new wrinkle with Nathan MacKinnon in the middle of the ice and while it generated a couple of nice looks the first time around, it immediately began producing diminishing returns to the point where the fourth and fifth power plays for the Avs, both in the third period of a 1-1 game, failed to generate much of anything meaningful at all. In fact, two of Arizona’s best looks of the third period came short-handed. I liked what they had going early in the game but the last two attempts, especially in that juncture of the game, were very discouraging.