The playoffs are here again, and this Avalanche team says things are different

CALGARY, Alberta – Hello, all, from the Saddledome. Tonight, the Avs will start their 32nd playoff round since moving to Denver in 1995, and I’ve been blessed to have covered all of them. I’ve missed two games in that whole run – one in 1998 against Edmonton, when my grandmother died and I went back east, and one in 2008 in Minnesota when I had a flareup of ulcerative colitis and couldn’t get off the…well, let’s move on.

OK, from the Avs’ locker room this morning: I’d characterize the mood as excited, and maybe a little more confident than the group that played in Nashville last year. This is a team that expected to be in the playoffs all along, although the journey to it was full of obstacles. Now that they’re here, they feel good and that they are playing some of their best hockey at the time right of the year.

The Avs went 8-1-2 down the stretch to get in, and the Avs did not have either Gabe Landeskog or Mikko Rantanen together in any of those 11 games. Landeskog missed six of those games and Rantanen missed eight of them.

I asked veteran Matt Calvert if there was one moment he could single out as where things turned for the better, and this is what he said:

“After the Anaheim game, we kind of sat down and had a talk and talked about guy stepping up and not getting frustrated with Arizona and Minnesota ahead of us, teams we felt we should have been ahead of,” Calvert told BSN Denver. “I think, as a whole, we decided we needed to defend better, and I think it starts from Gruby out, and our defense defending harder around the net, our forwards committed more. That was the main focus. We weren’t scoring a ton of goals in that stretch, but we found a way to win hockey games. I think we grew as a hockey team throughout that.”

Mike Smith, the 37-year-old veteran, will start in goal for the Flames. Before everybody gets all excited about this, based on his .898 regular-season saves percentage, here is his career playoff saves percentage: .945, with a 1.98 goals-against. Smith has played only 19 career playoff games, the last time going all the way back to 2012 with Arizona.

Smith LOVES to play the puck. He really loves to play the puck. He will come out of his net every chance he gets to play it, and he loves to pass the puck up the ice too. I asked several players, along with coach Bednar, whether this changes their forechecking scheme any, and got mixed responses. But, the fact is, the Avs have game-planned for this it sounds like.

“Definitely,” Calvert said, when I asked if Smith’s puck-handling will change anything on their forechecking scheme. “I think anytime you play a (Ben) Bishop or a (Pekka) Rinne, you adapt a little. Obviously, they’re like a third D-man back there, so you change your forecheck a little. The way to counteract that is getting good dumps, being smart with the puck and it’s something we’ve touched on this week.”

Said Nathan MacKinnon: “We’ve thought about it. I’m not sure what we’re going to do. There’s a couple different ideas we’ve been thinking about, but I wouldn’t even say it here.”

About the difference in attitude over last year, Jared Bednar said, “Last year, we entered the playoffs as a little bit of a surprise team…it just feels different to our group this year. We gained a lot of experience from that…I think our guys have earned the right to be a little bit confident here, the way we finished the season. We speak about being the underdog and embracing that, but it doesn’t squash our expectations on this series. I think our guys should think of ourselves as somebody to reckon with, and no better way to do it than take on the best team in the West.”

These, to the best of my knowledge, are the lines for tonight. There could be a tweak with Colin Wilson and Matt Nieto. The Avs didn’t really do any line rushes today, so these are the best estimates based on what I could gather:

Landeskog-MacKinnon-Kerfoot

Wilson-Soderberg-Rantanen

Calvert-Brassard-Compher

Nieto-Jost-Bourque

D

Girard-Johnson

Zadorov-Barrie

Cole-Nemeth

Grubauer in goal.

The healthy scratches are Sven Andrighetto, Ryan Graves and Mark Barberio. That’s a tough break for Andrighetto, who did some good things down the stretch.

Here are some uncut audio clips from the room this morning:

Nathan MacKinnon:

Matt Calvert:

Mikko Rantanen:

Gabe Landeskog:

Here is coach Bednar’s presser:

https://t.co/VlhKbpqv2G

— Adrian Dater (@adater) April 11, 2019