The battle of the bench bosses will have a major influence on Avs-Blues

Given his team is 5-0 in the postseason for the second straight season, there’s a sneaky amount of pressure on Colorado Avalanche head coach Jared Bednar right now.

It’s not the kind of pressure that results in a coach losing his job (if that was ever even a possibility, it ended with the tidy sweep of the Predators), but with a wildly-talented roster and a weaker conference than ever, Bednar needs results.

You’ll remember he cut his teeth as a head coach by winning championships in both the ECHL and AHL. He’s been to the top of the mountain at lower levels, but can he handle the very best in the business in the NHL?

In Colorado’s three previous second-round exits, Bednar lost twice to Pete DeBoer (once with San Jose, once with Vegas) and once to Dallas’s Rick Bowness in a series marred by injuries and utter chaos.

When the Avalanche collapsed against Vegas last year, the tide began turning in Game 2 as Vegas slowly took over the play on the ice and things didn’t really change until the Avs got back to Denver for Game 5.

I’m not here to relitigate past failures, though, but to look at the challenge facing Bednar and the Avalanche right now. On the other side is Craig Berube, a coach who led the Blues to the Stanley Cup in 2019 and is very well respected around the league.

While the Avs and Bednar got the best of Berube and the Blues last year, that was a badly overmatched St. Louis team missing both David Perron (COVID) and Justin Faulk (the hit that resulted in the playoff-ending suspension for Nazem Kadri). They simply weren’t deep enough to overcome those absences and the Avs walked to a relatively routine first-round sweep.

This year, however, an explosive Blues offense presents a very different kind of challenge. Unless you were in a coma during the various series previews done by every outlet in the business, you probably know the Blues had nine different 20-goal scorers this season and their offensive depth is their greatest strength, alongside excellent special teams.

You see, the dark secret that has been sitting right there for anyone who cared to look to dissect is that beyond those nine forwards, the forward depth for the Blues is, well, terrible.

Fourth lines are the stuff of legend in the NHL come postseason time for a reason! Just last weekend you saw Nick Paul score the first two postseason goals of his career and they were the only goals the Tampa Bay Lightning scored in their Game 7 victory over Toronto.

You just need guys like that to help get you there.

In Game 1 last night, with the injury issues of Blues defensemen Torey Krug and Marco Scandella, Berube opted to roll with the always-intriguing 11 forward/seven defensemen alignment.

In the aftermath, you can start to see what the Blues were trying to do with the alignment. Berube has a clear-cut top three on defense in Colton Parayko, Justin Faulk, and Nick Leddy. Calle Rosen doesn’t play on special teams but is Faulk’s regular 5v5 partner and has emerged ahead of Robert Bortuzzo and Niko Mikkola, who are the regulars on the third pairing.

The extra defender is Scott Perunovich, a crafty puck-moving defenseman who the staff absolutely does not trust at this stage.

At forward, Berube leaned on eight forwards in particular as all had ice time exceeding 17 minutes and five of them broke the 20-minute mark while Ivan Barbashev appears to be the odd-man-out from that cool guy 20-goal scorer’s club and is struggling to find ice time with Alexei Toropchenko and veteran Tyler Bozak.

When you consider there was only one St. Louis power play in this game, it’s not hard to believe the difference in ice time will be even sharper in future games when the Avalanche get sent to the box more frequently.

On the other side, Bednar countered with the traditional 12F/6D alignment. It was how each coach tried to use their lineup strengths that stood out to me.

I’m not going to rehash the preview work we did, but this is where Colorado’s superior defensive depth is really going to make a difference in this series, but more on that later.

When the Avs tried to slide their third line (Burakovsky/Compher/Aube-Kubel) onto the ice, the Blues went with a mix of their third line (Saad-Barbashev-Kyrou) and their second line (Buchnevich-Thomas-Tarasenko) with some variations in double-shifts because of the nature of 11-forward alignments.

Compher’s line mostly broke even against the Barbashev line but crushed the Thomas trio. That’s not a result the Blues can live with because they are purposely reducing the usage of their fourth line to right around 10 minutes of even-strength ice time. That leaves roughly 50 of the remaining 60 minutes for them to utilize their great forward depth to their advantage.

If their second and third lines can’t handle the Compher line, this series could be just as short as last year’s was.

Where Berube can really go hunting for an advantage is when Colorado wants to throw their true fourth line on the ice. In Game 1, that was the only line the Blues had any sustained success against, and that line probably should have scored when Nico Sturm hit Andrew Cogliano cross-ice for a scoring chance that beat Binnington but drew iron instead.

Even without that one odd-man rush, however, the Blues found success both in matching fourth lines (with a rotated third forward, usually Kyrou) and sliding their second and third lines out against Nico Sturm.

That’s where the Blues have to find their success. Their all-around effort in Game 1 just wasn’t very good and if that doesn’t improve, no amount of Binnington’s brilliance or Berube’s bench savvy will bail them out. They got run over in Game 1 and as each coach played their initial hand, it will be interesting to see how they respond.

From Bednar’s perspective, he’s happy to continue matching top lines. In the playoff series last year, MacKinnon destroyed O’Reilly until Berube had to give up entirely on the matchup and use his home-ice advantage in Games 3 and 4 to start strategically avoiding it.

Back in Denver for Game 1, Bednar went right at Ryan O’Reilly with his superstar top line and while the goals ended up even at 1-1, the shot metrics show the Avs annihilated the matchup throughout the game.

What struck me as curious was that Berube chose to consistently put his top D pairing in Leddy and Parayko on the ice with O’Reilly to get caved in by the MacKinnon matchup.

If you’re getting crushed anyway, why waste your top pairing and not try to use them to try to get one of the other lines going? Why continue beating your head against that rock all game? The game’s first goal was far too fluky for Berube to believe he could continue to thrive in that environment.

Bednar, on the other hand, just let it ride. Where he’s going to have to be careful in upcoming games is when the Blues are both playing better and better able to find those opportunities to attack Colorado’s bottom six.

Unlike Berube, however, Bednar has an ace up his sleeve that he can use to help buoy his forward depth as they try to manage those matchups. It’s the Avalanche defense, which has settled into three distinct pairings and what a huge difference it’s made so far.

Through Colorado’s 5-0 start in last year’s postseason, Bednar had to shuffle his back end significantly more than he has this year.

Even when you consider that this year’s ice time numbers will be higher just because Colorado has played two overtime games (versus none last year), the differences are gigantic.

At the same point last year, eight different pairings had played at least ten minutes together. This year? Just three, the standard pairings we’ve seen in every single game. Toews-Makar has been just as good as it was last year, but beyond that you could see that Bednar was searching for other pairings that clicked.

Here are Colorado’s five most frequent pairings and their 5v5 ice time last year.

• Toews-Makar (53:55)
• Graves-Girard (38:54)
• Girard-Makar (24:37)
• Nemeth-Graves (24:37)
• Nemeth-Timmins (17:40)

Versus this year.

• Toews-Makar (80:22)
• Manson-Girard (66:18)
• Johnson-Byram (53:55)
• Girard-Byram (8:31)
• Toews-Girard (7:40)

A sharp eye will notice that, shockingly, Colorado’s third pairing this year has been together exactly as much as last year’s top pairing at 53:55.

That stability is made possible by each pairing having its strengths and weaknesses but ultimately getting the job done at a comically high level. These numbers will absolutely come down at some point, but so far Colorado’s top three defensive pairings this postseason have an expected goal percentage of at least 59, with Johnson-Byram clocking in at a cool 70.37%.

When you consider Colorado’s on-ice struggles stemmed so much from the struggles of Nemeth, Graves, Timmins and Girard to consistently break pucks out against forechecks, this year’s stability, especially for Girard, is a key to the Avalanche handling whatever little quirks Berube throws at the Avalanche with his forward tinkering.

We talked last year that getting rid of Girard wasn’t the move, but providing better support around him was necessary because he just couldn’t do it on his own. As solid a player as Girard is, he just isn’t on the same level as Toews or Makar where he can simply elevate whatever pairing they are on because they’re that damn good.

There’s no shame in that for Girard, either, as both Makar and Toews are among the 10 best defensemen in the NHL. With Manson, Girard has found a physically imposing partner that can also skate and chip in offensively enough to not be considered an entirely one-dimensional player.

Hell, since getting to Colorado, Manson has played at a 30-point pace between the regular season and playoffs, which would easily be the second-best season of his career.

Considering that Girard and Manson scored two of the three goals in Game 1 and that Toews and Makar have combined for 15 points already this postseason, it is not just Colorado’s ability to match the Blues defensively that is problematic for Berube.

Colorado’s lockdown defense that so far this postseason has given up the fewest shots per game (27.4) is also an elite point-producing unit. Berube’s patchwork seven-defensemen alignment doesn’t have anywhere near the offensive punch as Colorado’s. If you count the injured Krug, the Blues’ defense has managed to produce 16 points so far this postseason, a continuation of their regular-season struggles to generate offense from the back end.

Simply put, Berube has to win the matchup war with Bednar.

This isn’t a major stylistic battle between one offensive juggernaut and an elite shutdown defense. These are two high-scoring teams that want to draw penalties, score goals, and go Globetrotters on their opponents.

Berube knows his team can’t defend at the level required to play 2-1 hockey. The Blues have to outscore their shortcomings and that has to come from winning the chess match that is line-matching.

If Krug ever gets healthy and/or the Blues go back to the 12/6 alignment, the math on this could change or it could just make the Blues’ situation different, not necessarily better.

Certainly Krug’s natural puck-moving skill would be welcome in what should be a more offensively-tilted series, but until he’s part of the equation, it’s on Berube to manufacture solutions to the problems the Avalanche present. The awkwardness of this 11/7 configuration might just be Berube’s best strategic play in this series.

The chess match has only just begun with Game 1 in the books. It was just the opening salvo of what should be a fascinating coaching battle, one that could catapult Bednar into the conversation among the NHL’s elite, or add another layer of uncertainty to his ability to lead a team deep into the postseason.