Five weeks ago the Colorado Avalanche lost a game to the lowly Chicago Blackhawks and Devon Toews teed off on some of his teammates after it was over. The Avs have put together their best extended run of play since.
Two nights ago, the Los Angeles Kings lost a game to the lowly Buffalo Sabres and Drew Doughty went on a Toews-esque rant. If there was ever a game where the Avs might get caught peeking ahead to their forthcoming extended break, a contest against an extremely motivated, desperate team was it.
The result was further proof of Colorado’s championship credentials.
Logan O’Connor scored twice, Nathan MacKinnon continued to dominate at a level few players can reach and the Avalanche rolled into the break with a 5-1 victory Friday night at Ball Arena. The Avs are now 13-3-1 since that sluggish night in Chicago, while the Kings lost for the 13th time in 15 games.
“Pretty happy with the way our guys played again tonight, from the goaltender out against a really good team,” Avs coach Jared Bednar said. “It’s nice to win a couple games and being playing some solid hockey going into the break.”
If the Kings were hoping for a fast start, O’Connor squashed that with a pair of first-period goals. He now has eight goals in his past nine games, and 13 for the season — his previous career high was nine.
O’Connor’s second was a vintage playoff-style goal. The Kings are known as a defense-first outfit and tailor their system to make teams play dump-and-chase hockey. That is the antithesis of how the Avs typically like to play, but their “identity line” showed that is in the arsenal as well.
The Avs dumped the puck at the center red line. Ross Colton forechecked Doughty into a turnover. Miles Wood collected it, then snapped a pass to O’Connor for a snipe from the left circle at 14:55 of the period.
“The work away from the puck is what resulted in that,” O’Connor said. “(Wood) and (Colton) did a great job on the forecheck, having active sticks and getting into the body. Woody made a nice play. Al the work happened before I got the puck.”
MacKinnon scored at 18:30 to give the Avs a 3-0 lead and continue his run at both the Hart and Art Ross trophies. He added an assist on a third-period goal, and now leads the NHL with 84 points in 49 games, one more than Tampa Bay’s Nikita Kucherov as they continue to jostle back and forth at the top of the league standings. MacKinnon has 41 points in his past 19 games, while Kucherov has 36 in that span.
He has at least one point in 25 straight home games to start the season. MacKinnon tied Bobby Orr for the second-longest such streak to start the season. Wayne Gretzky holds the record, having scored in 40 straight home games in 1988-89.
There was one point in this game where the Kings had a chance to make it competitive. Kevin Fiala scored to make it 3-1 early in the second period, then the Avs did very little during a four-minute power play. Fiala came out of the box and had a breakaway, but Alexandar Georgiev stoned him twice.
Josh Manson scored on a give-and-go with Andrew Cogliano less than a minute later, and then Cale Makar scored a power-play goal off Doughty just 29 seconds into the third to end any doubt.
“That’s two really good games in a row (for Georgiev),” Bednar said. “We didn’t up a lot tonight, but we gave up three breakaways. … He made some big saves, and that’s what I want to see out of our guy. Just make the saves you’re supposed to make, mix in a few of the really tough ones and give us a really good chance to win. It started with him today.”
Even when the score was 5-1, the Avs had a frantic sequence where Joel Kiviranta blocked a shot, Georgiev made two saves and then Samuel Girard saved a sure goal with another block. It was just another moment where the locked-in Avalanche showed their struggling visitors what it looks like when times are good.
The Kings will continue to search for answers while a once-promising season continues to trend in the wrong direction. The Avs look like they’re ready for the playoffs to start tomorrow.
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