Just finished this game. Man do I wish I skipped it. Every problem that has plagued this team this year was a problem in this one.
Teams starts the game sloppy just like every night. Barrie gets caught totally out of position in the first few minutes to give up a partial breakaway. Calvert completely forgets about Burakovsky who he's been covering, and lets him walk right in for the back door tap in goal.
Cole takes his nightly terrible penalty in the 2nd period that always seems to lead to a goal. Then he takes another one of his dumb sneaky penalties he thinks he can get away with without the refs seeing. Which they always do. I was actually happy Wilson beat the shit out of him after that crap. Kills a dangerous 2 on 2 rush the Avs were about to have, and puts them on the PK when they’re down 3-2 late in the 3rd.
Things weren’t much better in goal. All the pucks were either bouncing off Varly like a racquet ball or sneaking through him. You can maybe make a case that Ovi has a blast of a one timer, but that 3rd goal that went off his blocker was just absolutely unacceptable. Especially right at the beginning fo the 3rd.
All the tweeners like Ghetto, Nieto, and Calvert displayed their nightly lack of poise all game because they’re worried about moving their feet faster than their mind to play Bednar’s system that’s too demanding for them.
Kerfoot like usual when he plays a big team, got boxed out of every play, and was pretty invisible. Same with Ghetto who I saw get forced about 20 feet wide when he was trying to crash the net. He also managed to shoot the puck into the corner off a wide open one timer in the slot. That was pretty impressive.
Then in OT MacKinnon selfishly refuses to leave the ice and stays out for a full two minutes. He coughs up Barrie’s pass because he’s tired, while Barrie skates into Mikko and knocks him down, and they lose. Just a comedy of errors and so preventable.
I still don't think Bednar has them practice the 3 on 3, because every single time they look completely confused at what to do, and always make terrible line changes. The Avs problems in OT is 100% on the coaching staff. There's no way they should be this bad and look so out of sync every single time. With the standings so close, OT is responsible for way too many lost points that the coaching staff is ignoring.
There’s problems with the lack of secondary scoring in the personel, and either average or bad goaltending every night, but I’m getting to the point where it might be time to make a change behind the bench. Bednar just can’t weed out these mistakes the team is making, and these sloppy mistake filled starts are putting them behind the eight ball every night.
I just have no faith in this team’s ability to win games right now. It was 1-1 early in the 2nd and I almost just turned the game off because it didn’t feel like there was any way they’d win this game. They were lucky to get one point out of this game to be honest.
Bad start, bad mistakes, bad penalties, bad goaltending, lack of poise. Usually it’s one or two of these things that’s leading to losses. In this one it was everything.
