The Colorado Avalanche are still 5-0-3 on the season.
As far as pluses go, that seems like a fairly good one, right? Still being only one of two teams in the league without a regulation loss through their 8 games played so far is certainly impressive, and stacking points early in the season is exactly what a team should want to do… But now begs the question: when is fighting just for one point not enough?
Parker Kelly and the Avs catch a break early in the second period with a challenged goal that goes their way, but ultimately, the group needs to get going much sooner and needs a lot more from some of the guys they’re deploying.
Before we get into takeaways, let’s get into those jerseys
The last time the Carolina Hurricanes and Colorado Avalanche saw each other was in December of 2024, where now-current member of the team, Martin Necas, tallied the game winner to beat the Avalanche on home ice 5-3.
But we didn’t see those jerseys on the ice last night. What we saw instead, I might consider more nostalgic than anything.
The last time we saw these two jerseys face off against each other was May 3rd of 1995. The Hartford Whalers might’ve claimed the first goal, courtesy of Darren Turcotte, but the Quebec Nordiques came out swinging and ended up netting four goals to finish the night 4-1. Names like Andrei Kovalenko and Joe Sakic led the way, which is… an insane sentence to write out in today’s day and age.
The Avs showed them off for the first of seven games they’ll play wearing the iconic throwbacks, and boy, were they pretty.
On the other side, the Hurricanes donned their inspired Whalers thread to reignite a visually pleasing clash of the Adams Division rivalry once more.
FULL HERITAGE NIGHT SCHEDULE (Remaining games):
- November 29, 2025, vs. Montreal Canadiens
- January 3, 2026 @ Carolina Hurricanes
- January 12, 2026 vs. Toronto Maple Leafs
- March 16, 2026 vs. Pittsburgh Penguins
- April 1, 2026 vs. Vancouver Canucks
- April 11, 2026 vs. Vegas Golden Knights
The goaltending was… meh, until Trent Miner
Scott Wedgewood, as good as he’s been overall during the seven games he’s played, let in four goals on 11 shots. That’s… not great.
I wouldn’t be so quick as to put them all on him, but as Coach Bednar said in last night’s presser, “you need to come up with one.”
Multiple guys were quick to reference a lack of a “full-team effort” for the entire game, and Gabe Landeskog even went further to say “we left him out to dry.” I’d agree in saying the full effort from everyone is needed to keep those four goals from happening, but it was clear they needed a spark somehow.
Enter Trent Miner, who had not played a single minute of regular-season hockey so far this season, up until Wedgewood was pulled.
Going in cold, without any sort of warm-up, Miner came in and, for lack of better words, looked incredible. Rebound control was maybe a little spotty, but he got the job done. Without him, I’d go even further to wager that this game looks a heck of a lot worse than 5-4.
To show up big for the team with all the necessary saves but one (and that Seth Jarvis shootout goal was filthy), he deserves almost every ounce of credit for the team being able to pull a point out of this one.
We finally need to have a serious talk about this power play…
I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been very wishy-washy as far as the power play is concerned. Throughout the season, they’ve had their ups and downs, but when it comes to the team, they’ve been confident that if it continued to look the way it did, the chances they were generating would eventually find the back of the net. They’ve attempted to shift a few things and experiment with some different players on the top unit, and somehow, in the spirit of trying to get better, it got worse.
Call it chemistry or failed roles or what-have-you, but going 1 for 8 on the night is atrocious.
Carolina is known for being one of the best defensive teams in the league, so sure, an already-struggling power play didn’t have great chances, but to give up a short-handed goal against a team defensively depleted injury-wise just seems unfathomable.
Colorado’s power play allowed two different breakaways toward the beginning of the game, one of which the Hurricanes capitalized on thanks to a white-hot Seth Jarvis, who is now tied for first in goals with 7 (Shane Pinto, Pavel Dorofeyev, Cole Caufield, Mark Scheifele).
With some adjustments, mainly consisting of moving Nichushkin onto the first unit, things started to look more cohesive. It seems like they finally started creating lanes and putting dangerous chances on net. Fortunately, it pays off, and lo and behold, Valeri Nichushkin is the one to convert.
Good news: this power play was their most dangerous look of the night.
Bad news: now the conversation needs to be had about how the power play as a whole is deployed.
The big (and hopeful) conversation since the beginning of the season was that, with the addition of Victor Olofsson and Brent Burns, the Avs would be able to deploy two dangerous units as opposed to mainly running with one dangerous one, then a second to make sure their main guys don’t get overworked. That no longer seems to be the case.
I guess the silver lining is that at least one unit could get going as opposed to getting a solid donut for both units on the night.
A full 60 minutes of Colorado Avalanche hockey would help
When asked about the positives to take away from last night’s game, especially highlighting the change in play from the first period to the second and third, Coach Bednar was quick to give his flowers to the team for finding it. With that said, the mention of consistency was loud.
“That’s just how we gotta play. That’s how we gotta play, that’s how we do play. But you’ve gotta do it for a full 60 if you want two points.”
This is something Landeskog also mentioned during his postgame availability. It’s a conversation he’s had, not only with Coach Bednar, but with a team as a whole.
“We’re resilient. We’re a good team, no doubt about it. I know [Bednar’s] talked about it before, but the 60-minute effort is what you want to try to perfect early on and as often as you can throughout the season, so we want to make sure we don’t have any lapses, and tonight, obviously we had a bit of a lull in the first period and we were able to bounce back after that, which is important, but we would’ve liked the first period to look a lot different.”
The question then becomes: how many times does this kind of game need to happen for them to say, ‘just one point is no longer enough’?
Racking up points is fantastic, especially early on in the season, so the pressure of perfect performances in the final push to the playoffs isn’t as high, but it doesn’t seem sustainable. The Avalanche then become known as a gritty team as opposed to a dominant one, and based on a lot of the comments from Media Day and onward, that doesn’t seem like the narrative this team wants to set for themselves. This is a team that was disappointed with last year’s result, and a team that wants to turn that into a hungry, dominant push for something better this season.
They won’t get there until they can find that part of their game sooner in a matchup rather than later.