Defense-first Stars befuddle Avalanche, win Game 3 for 2-1 series lead

Colorado’s high-flying hockey team has run into a problem it’s going to need to solve, and that’s the defensive acumen of the Dallas Stars.

The Avalanche dominated Game 3 of this second-round playoff series territorially, but not on the scoreboard. Tyler Seguin and Logan Stankoven both had a pair of goals, while Jake Oettinger made 29 saves Saturday night at Ball Arena to help Dallas prevail 4-1 and reclaim home-ice advantage in the series.

The Stars now lead the series 2-1. Game 4 is here Monday night.

“They’re checking hard and they were above everything,” Avs coach Jared Bednar said. “Obviously very disciplined in their structure in the third period, especially when they didn’t need any more to win. Kind of waited for us to force some stuff and make some mistakes to create their scoring chances.

“My one take would be we’ve got to make it a little bit tougher on Oettinger, getting traffic there.”

Colorado had 61 percent of the shot attempts in this game and nearly a 2-1 advantage in scoring chances, per Natural Stat Trick. The Avs had a 3-1 advantage in power plays, but didn’t create much with the extra man.

The Avalanche have been the best comeback team in the NHL this season. The Avs have a win in this series because of a third-period comeback. There wasn’t one this time around.

“I thought we did a lot of great things,” Avs forward Nathan MacKinnon said. “We really had a lot of chances, a lot of good looks. Just Oettinger was great and we made a couple of big errors that cost us.”

Dallas found the only goal in a choppy first period. Colorado had a couple of chances to get the puck out of danger, the last of which was a MacKinnon pass to Devon Toews that didn’t connect. Miro Heiskanen collected it, shoveled a backhanded pass to Logan Stankoven and the rookie squeezed his first Stanley Cup Playoffs goal through Alexandar Georgiev at 18:39 of the period.

Colorado had 25 of the 34 shot attempts in the opening 20 minutes, but crisp passing sequences were hard to come by. The Stars also blocked nearly as many shots (10) as ones that reached Oettinger (12).

“(Oettinger) played well. I think we’re trying to get traffic there,” Avs forward Andrew Cogliano said. “He seemed like he found his rhythm tonight a little bit in that game, but I think we’ve had good opportunities throughout the series and created a good rebounds and we’ve scored goals. So we’ll draw on that.”

Mikko Rantanen got the Avs on the board midway through the second period. Toews found MacKinnon at the top of the circles and he deked past Chris Tanev for a backhanded shot. Rantanen was there to clean up the rebound for his third goal of the postseason.

The Avalanche continued to pour on the pressure, but the Stars have already proven to be much more adept at keeping Colorado from stringing together a bunch of scoring chances.