I would have to say Pickard made at least 5 game savers tonight. He played very well and stole us a point.
The Avs really only played for 30 minutes tonight.
I didn't watch tonights game so maybe I was wrong and he actually did stand on his head.
But, I did watch the Sens game, and the Chicago game last week, and I thought in both games the Avs actually played very well despite being heavily out-shot, especially against CHI.
In both games Varlamov really didn't have to make any huge saves for the team. He had to make a couple for sure, but every goalie generally makes a couple big saves every game. Other then that I thought he faced a lot of pretty easy straightforward shots in both games and especially the Chicago game.
It's obviously better for the team if we had more possession and played in the other teams zone more often than we are, but I do think that we're doing a pretty good job in our own end right now.
I mean,We've only given up 3+ goals in 7 of our last 17 games, and 5 of those 7 games we gave up exactly 3.
36 goals against in our last 17 games. Barely over 2GAA. That's on both our Defense and our Goaltending IMO. I think they've both played well this past month, the goalies are doing a good job making those initial saves(And the rebounds when necessary), and the Defense is doing a good job at making those saves easy saves.
I think its our offense(Seems to have been the story all season) that is struggling right now, as evidenced by our last 2 games. 4 regulation goals against in 2 games, and we have 1 point to show for it. That's simply not good enough for the forwards.
There is absolutely no way you can say that giving up 40+ shots a game is anything other than horrible. And to a terrible team like the Hurricanes, no less. If a team is taking that money shots, it shows the Avs very rarely have the puck.
The Avs have given up 216 shots in the last 5 games. That's disgusting, and three of those games were against teams below them in the standings.
Its horrible in the sense that it basically signals that the opposition is in our zone with puck possession a lot more then we're in their zone.
But I dont think the actualy shot totals are that big of a deal. The big deal is our teams struggles to regain possession and move the puck out of our zone. But the Defense is doing a good job at making these shots poor shot attempts. We've got to do a better job at tracking the puck, stealing the puck, and moving the puck out of our zone efficiently, that's the real issue that arises when we give up that many shots. We're in our zone too much.
