St. Louis Blues Suffocate Colorado Avalanche En Route To 3-1 Victory
By Austin Manak
The Colorado Avalanche signature style is a fluid and fast-paced game. They are at their best when they have open-ice to streak across, and fresh-air to fuel their creative hockey minds.
Tonight, St. Louis was stifling, and like a boa constrictor, slowly squeezed all of the life out of the Avs. By the end of the night, the burgundy and white, was rendered an oxygen deprived hue of purple. The Avalanche head back to Denver, after an up-and-mostly-down road trip, that ends up netting a disappointing 4 out of 10 possible points.
Tonight’s contest actually started out promising for the Avalanche. They showed some life in their first few shifts, and weren’t backing down from the Blues physically.
The Avalanche’s push earned them an early power play, which ended up being a bit of ominous foreshadowing for the rest of the night. The Avalanche were content passing the puck around the perimeter, and when they did try anything remotely aggressive, failed to make the crisp pass needed to slice the Blues defense apart. The power play ended up producing 0 shots on goal. For those who are clever, you will have deduced that the Avs also ended up with 0 goals.
Shortly after PP Debacle 1.0 of the night, St. Louis scored the first goal of the game. It wasn’t an overly beautiful goal, but resulted from a SHOT ON NET. Carl Gunnarson took a shot from the point, which got a favorable deflection off Alex Tanguay, and beat Semyon Varlamov.
St. Louis entered the game with a 20-4-1 when scoring the game’s first goal, so the uphill path to victory was set for the Avs.
Matt Duchene took the first step towards scaling that hill, with a backhand goal after a nice takeaway. The puck bounced off Paul Stastny before sliding between the legs of Brian Elliott.
This was as far up that hill as the Avs would get. After the Duchene goal, gravity took hold, and the Avs fell head-over-heels down said hill for the remainder of the game.
By gravity, I mean the forecheck and puck hustle of the Blues. They were relentless in all aspects of the game, and like the title of this recap says, suffocated any life that the Avalanche may have had at the start of the game.
This Blues style was aided by poor passing and puck control from the Avalanche. The Blues were able to continually ramp up the pressure, because the Avs weren’t able to pass their way out of trouble, or punish the aggressive style of the Blues. St. Louis also dominated the board play, and generated a lot of additional zone time with their heavy style.
Jaden Schwartz scored a power play goal early in the second period, and T.J. Oshie scored about ten minutes later, and that was all the offense St. Louis would need.
The rest of the game was a clinic on setting up well positionally in the neutral zone, and forcing the Avalanche into mistakes to slow their counter-attack.
Once again for the Avs, Semyon Varlamov came up big, but aside from Duchene, the big guns didn’t have good games. Tyson Barrie made a few costly errors, and got manhandled by Oshie on the Blues third goal of the game. Gabe Landeskog was feisty, but didn’t get to the scoring areas. Nathan MacKinnon was quiet, and Ryan O’Reilly’s only real good chance of the night came in the waning seconds.
The Avalanche still are in touch with the playoffs, but they are going to need to take care of business at home. The Avalanche have a home date with the Boston Bruins up next, and then a few days off for the All-Star Break. Including the Boston game, 7 of their next 11 will be on home ice. Protect the altitude!