Breaking Down: A Week of Blown Leads

The Avs had an absolutely gruesome week, blown leads in 3 games where they had score and on-ice play in their favor before collapsing. The lone win in Chicago was ugly and a foreshadowing of what happened Saturday night at the Pepsi Center. The reasons are many and varied but in general it comes down to playing soft and complacent with the lead and missing opportunities that a month ago would have produced blowouts in their favor. Every team goes into a bit of a safe mode in the third period with a lead but starting that mentality in second periods spells big trouble.

Projectile Lineup

The forward personnel were steady this week but the actual lines bounced around game by game. The consistent setups were Mack and Mikko on the 1st, Kadri on the 2nd, PEB and Calvert on the 3rd and Compher on the 4th. The rest moved around until we ended up with the lines below in the 2nd Chicago game

The defense went through some changes. Calle Rosen played vs St Louis, was benched and ultimately sent back to the Eagles. Anton Lindholm took his place at Chicago and stayed the rest of the week. Mark Barberio played the first two games then was benched when EJ made his return against Carolina.

Grubi was in net for all 3 losses and Frank got the lone win.

Landy – Mack – Mikko
Burky – Kadri – Donskoi
Nuke – PEB – Calvert
Nieto – Jost – Compher

Big Z – Sam
Graves – EJ
Cole – Lindholm

Grubi
Frank

Scratch: Barbs, Kamenev
Injured: Makar (UBI), Wilson (LBI)

Blues – L (5-2)

St Louis controlled the 1st period but the Avs came out hot from the intermission, scored right away to tie and proceeded to dominate play for the first 15 minutes. After a PPG from Mikko then another power play chance they let off the gas with a 2-1 lead and the Blues pounced, taking control of the game and scoring 2 goals on a double minor at the end of the period to take a 3-2 lead into 2nd inters. Collapse #1 of the week. Colorado didn’t show up for the 3rd period and ultimately lost 5-2.

Hawks – W (4-1)

After a back and forth opening, the Avs took complete control of this game going on a 25-6 shot run for the rest of the period. The downside was that the game was 1-1 going to intermission. The 2nd opened back and forth again until the Avs scored 2 quick goals in the middle of the period. Then they sat back again, getting outshot 26-11 for the rest of the game. Francouz was amazing or this would have been yet another collapse on the week. Even so it was ugly and the Hawks clearly learned something to use on Saturday night.

Canes – L (3-1)

Collapse #2 of the week came late in this game. After blowing chances left and right the Avs finally went ahead early in the 3rd period on their 6th power play chance. Carolina destroyed them for the rest of the game going 17-4 in shot attempts and scoring 3 goals in the closing minutes to take the win.

Hawks – L (5-3)

After a strong 1st period gave Colorado a 1-0 lead the teams traded goals early in P2. The Avs once again sat back, this time with over 35 minutes remaining in the game, while the Hawks went on a 15-1 shot run and drew a couple penalties. No damage but it was disappointing. The Avs woke up briefly near the end with Captain Gabe drawing a penalty then Matt Calvert scoring his 2nd improbable goal of the night to make it 3-1. Chicago came out hot in the 3rd but the Avs finally showed some resiliency and countered with around 7 minutes of really strong play, an 11-0 shot run and a power play to boot. Then collapse #3 happened. There were some awful personal plays but this was very much a team deal. The Hawks ended up scoring 4 goals in the final 8 minutes to take 2 points in a game they weren’t really in until the Avs fell apart before our eyes.

Team Stats

The Avs got outshot and outscored by a pretty fair margin over the week. There were some meaningless goals in there but the numbers are pretty indicative of a 1-3 record. They generated quality at around their usual rate, 6.89 expected goals on 122 unblocked attempts, but the finish wasn’t there with only 1.02 goals per expected goal. That’s a big drop from around 1.4 where they’ve been most of the year. They allowed 7.23 expected goals against, which isn’t bad considering, but the opposition scored 9 times off of that, which is bad. Game pace at 5v5 was a fairly slow average of 116 per hour, mainly from the Avs sitting back for large parts of the week.

The power play scored twice in 13 chances, not great but not far off average. The PK only allowed 2 goals, the two on the double minor in the Blues game, so those were pretty big. Net even on special teams so that means this week was a loss at 5v5.

TOI

The top 6 forwards this week at 5v5 were Mack (14+), Mikko (14), Landy (13), Kadri (12+), Burky (12) and Calvert (12). Anyone seen JT Compher lately? I bet you haven’t since he only averaged 8:37 this week, low man on the team by a lot.

The defensive regime at 5v5 went Graves (18), Sam (17+), Big Z (16+), EJ (16+)/Barbs (15+) in two games each, Cole (15) and then Lindholm (11)/Rosen (10) in the 6th man role. Big Z had a period off for reasons still unclear or he’d probably be nearer or above Girard.

Individual

– Matt Calvert was the only multiple goal scorer at 5v5 with two. Mack had one goal on 11 SOG in just under 60 minutes time, kind of a down week for him. Mikko and Gabe combined to match his 11 SOG but only managed an assist each. Ryan Graves was your scoring star of the week at 5v5 with a goal and 2 assists. Mikko added a PPG and an empty-netter for 3 points total. Cole, Landy and Mack joined those two in the 3-point club.

– The company line on the goalies has gone from “Grubi is the clear #1” to “we like both our goalies”. I’m not going to read a lot into that or the fact that Frank has outplayed Grubi recently until the shit really hits the fan. I don’t think Grubauer had a good week at all but he faced much tougher competition and the problems in front of him were very troubling.

– I’d like to see a little more ownership of these collapses on Jared Bednar and the staff. After last night’s game he once again talked about bad plays in the final minutes leading to the loss. He’s not wrong but when the warning signs are there, like the soft collapse early in the 2nd period last night, then something needs to happen. Quick. We’ve all seen this before, he doesn’t have the luxury of standing by and letting that soft play go. It has to be corrected immediately. If that top line isn’t working, and it really isn’t, then he’s got to find a way to get some chemistry in the top 6 because the 2nd line has been garbage too. I don’t care how badly he wants those 3 to play together, if it takes splitting them up to get them going then that’s what has to happen. Right now both lines in the top 6 are too easy to play against and aren’t producing offensively. That wasn’t the case with bottom 6 guys filling in there so I don’t see a reason to be stubborn about it. Figure it out before we get the yearly collapse.

Burgundy Narrative Metric

– “Best guys being your best guys” gets a (-) nah
– Quality vs Quantity gets a (-) quantity low, quality ok comparatively
– Power Play Watchability gets a (-) fire Ray Bennett now
– The Dreaded Turtle gets a (+) I don’t even want to think about the actual time and shot diff here for all 4 games
– Starting Goalie Battle% gets a (-) Grubi was terrible, Frank was good
– Referee Oppression Index gets a (+) 13 opportunities on PP vs 12 PK’s, fair and not intrusive other than the Carolina game I thought. Lots of folks don’t like the call on Mack booting it in last night but that’s an easy one.

Total: -4¾

Next up

At Vegas on Monday then a couple days off for Christmas. You don’t even want to know about the schedule after, it’s real tough.

Thanks as always to the NHL and Natural Stat Trick for numbers and visuals