Colorado Avalanche: Dallas was not Just Another Loss

The Colorado Avalanche’s play on Tuesday night gives us some hope for tonight’s game. They need to stop the losing skid.

Some people would see the other nights game by the Colorado Avalanche as yet another disappointing loss. Another one to add to the tally of recent losses.

In the past few games, the Avalanche have looked lack-luster, with no drive at all, or if there has been drive it’s been for very short bursts. Most of the team has looked slow and tired and as if they were just not interested, not committed to winning the hockey game.

Whereas Tuesday night it was different, at least for me. What I saw was a team who 12 – 15 minutes into the first period got some spark. They looked very committed and had the drive to take charge of the game.

This was very different from the lack of commitment in the past week or so. From that point on the Colorado Avalanche looked like they wanted to win the hockey game.

Sure, things didn’t go their way. Some calls on the ice going there way and others not. It didn’t seem to phase the team though. The drive and aggression in their committed play was very evident.

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One great example was when Coach Bednar challenged the goal call by the Stars player who used a broken stick to score. Well I thought that was the case, but the NHL Officials thought otherwise. The challenge was unsuccessful and the Avalanche gained a four-minute minor penalty.

The Avalanche players stood up and killed the penalty with some solid play that made the four minutes fly by. In other penalties recently their defensive, or perhaps I should say non-defensive play, during the penalty kills had me wish the penalties would just end. They seemed to drag on for ages. Considering they were only two-minute penalties it was a crazy dichotomy.

During both the second and third periods the level of commitment by the team was huge. They played out those last forty minutes with aggression and commitment to win.

For me, this shows that the teams’ mental attitude has changed. In his, after game interview, Joonas Donskoi used very different language to that of the players in the past couple of weeks. He spoke of the positive shift and how the team realized they need to keep things simple and go back to basics in order to win games.

The whole tone of his interview was one of positivity and talking about how the team can win; they know how to win and it’s all about executing that.

It’s great to see that they have all made a mental shift.

The new line combinations that Coach Bednar started the night with may have helped, although during the game the lines were shifted up a lot.

Maybe the team have realized that they can play without Mikko Rantanen and Gabriel Landeskog.

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They might have realized that neither of those two players is coming back in a hurry and so it is now up to them to make the wins happen. I hope that’s the case and this new-found positive outlook on their ability to play great winning hockey stays with them in the coming matchups.

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