Avalanche was ready for tough sledding

Toughness accopanied talent in Colorado's 6-game Stanley Cup Final victory.

Gabriel Landeskog was stranded, like a ship on the wrong end of the supply chain.

He had just extended his foot to block a shot by Nikita Kucherov, late in the third period of Stanley Cup Final Game 6. His foot stayed on, but the skate blade didn’t, and now Landeskog was a long way from the Colorado bench, immobilized, with the water rising. Could this be yet another too-many-men penalty for the Avalanche, just as the Cup was getting large and real through its windshield?

Nathan MacKinnon, Landeskog’s linemate and protege, had the only answer. He basically grabbed, pushed and threw Landeskog toward the boards and out of harm’s way. Nothing untoward happened to the Avalanche, mainly because Tampa Bay, the 2-time defending champs, had run out of championship juice. A few minutes later, Landeskog was accepting the Cup from NHL assistant commissioner Bill Daly.

The Avalanche had won the game (2-1) and the series (4-2) and was a champ for the first time since Ray Bourque’s golden moment in 2001.

MacKinnon’s emotional rescue was the symbol for this game and this team. Landeskog has captained the Avalanche for nine seasons now. When he earned the “C” on his jersey, he was 19, youngest to do so in NHL history. At the time it seemed a little cruel, because the Avalanche was fading from contention, and Landeskog looked for all the world like a second lieutenant getting pushed to the front. Inside, they knew better. Milan Hejduk had voluntarily given up the C because he wasn’t such a factor anymore, and he sensed the kid could handle it.

The Avalanche played in just one postseason series in Landeskog’s first seven years as captain and, in 2017, suffered a 22-56 season as coach Patrick Roy threw up his blocker and walked away just before the first puck drop. That forced general manager Joe Sakic to name Jared Bednar, who had never played in the NHL, and had done most of his work as a defenseman and a coach for the South Carolina Stingrays of the East Coast Hockey League. So there was a lot of concurrent growth, and a few setbacks, too, including last year’s second-round loss to Las Vegas, Colorado responded to those burdens by going 16-4 in the playoffs with two sweeps, and showing the world that it was possible to beat Tampa Bay goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy on a win-or-go-home night.

Talent, however you measure that, is not enough. Colorado would already have a couple of Cups if that were true. It wasn’t talent that prompted Nico Sturm, scoreless in Colorado for the season, to sprawl at his own blue line to knock a puck back toward center ice when Tampa Bay was trying to set up a third-period push. 

In that period the Lightning had four shots on goal, and it always looked like there were too many white jerseys on the ice, seeing pucks first and retrieving them, knocking them back behind Tampa Bay’s net as the clock oozed down, avoiding those momentum-crunching icing violations, staying out of the penalty box (although it might have required a bonesaw to get there, since there were only two penalties the entire game). It was public asphyxiation, and it was pretty much that way after Artturi Lehkonen had gunned the game-winning shot in the second period. Colorado goalie Darcy Kuemper faced only nine high-danger chances the entire game. Overall the Avalanche had 65 total shots (on goal, blocked or missed the net) and Tampa Bay had 51.

It also took foresight by Joe Sakic, still the best player in franchise history and now the general manager. He was determined to cover all his bets at the trade deadline. He got Lekhonen from Montreal, and Lehkonen got the decisive score in the Final and the Western Conference Final, as he’d done for Montreal in the semifinals last year. He got defenseman Josh Manson as a bigger, more experienced replacement for the injured Samuel Girard. He got Andrew Cogliano for fourth-line speed and toughness, and Cogliano kept hurting his hands while blocking shots but still managed to hold the Cup at the end.

It took the fury of Kadri, who had thumb surgery after being boarded by Edmonton’s Evander Kane but scored the biggest goal of the Final, winning Game 4 and creating a 3-1 lead. Sakic got Kadri from Toronto, in exchange for Tyson Barrie and Alexander Kerfoot. Ducks coach Dallas Eakins coached Kadri in the minors for three years and grew weary of his lack of dedication, likening him to someone “with a really bad drug addiction” because he wasn’t in shape. Kadri fixed that, but then became a counterproductive penalty magnet. Last year he was suspended for eight games for a crime against the Blues’ Kevin Faulk, which meant Colorado didn’t have him against Vegas, a series they led 2-0 but lost. This year he was the proximate cause of a series-ending injury to goalie Jordan Binnington of St. Louis. But Kadri persevered to become the first Muslim-born player to win a Cup. On the ice afterward, he said those who doubted him “can kiss my ass.”

And, of course, it took Cale Makar, at 23 the youngest defenseman since Bobby Orr in 1970 to win the Conn Smythe trophy. He had 30 points in the playoffs. He also won the Norris Trophy, over Victor Hedman and Roman Josi, and did so because he matched up against the top lines. Makar teams with MacKinnon to give Colorado two franchise faces, and at Ball Arena during warmups, the glass is full of homemade signs from high school girls (and younger) pleading for a chance to meet or marry Makar, whichever is convenient.

But Maker doesn’t seem distractable. At UMass he was invited to play for Canada in the 2018 Olympics but begged off because he said he would be asked to emphasize his strengths, and he felt he needed to doctor his weaknesses. Greg Carvel, the former Ducks assistant who won the 2021 Frozen Four with UMass, remembered the day he was able to reconfirm that Makar was coming. “We just signed Erik Karlsson,” he said. He was shortchanging his man.

Winning the Cup takes all that. Getting through the celebration does, too. The Avalanche will have a parade on Thursday and then comes sleep, at least for the players. Repeating the quest is too much to think about, but Colorado will be everyone’s favorite again. You saw why in the third period, when a captain became a brother that wasn’t too heavy.