NASHVILLE — The Colorado Avalanche continues to take one step forward and one step back away from Ball Arena.
Cody Glass had a hat trick and Juuse Saros made 25 saves Saturday to help the Nashville Predators slowly pull away in a 5-1 victory at Bridgestone Arena.
“(Our play) slid more and more as the game went on,” forward Logan O’Connor said. “The puck became like a hand grenade for us. When that happens, you have to support one another and be closer, but I felt like we were more spread out. The result can be what you just saw and that’s a sloppy, sloppy second half of the game for us.”
The Avs are the NHL’s best team at home with a 23-6-0 record. They continue look like a middle-of-the-pack outfit on the road. This loss dropped the Avs to 14-14-5 outside of Denver this season.
The game started well enough for the Avs, but the Predators took control during the second half and there was no late surge for a potential comeback like Colorado has cultivated several times this year.
“Just not willing to continue to make it a gritty, muddy hockey game,” Devon Toews said. “That’s the way they play. They are tough in their structure. They grind you. They wear you down. They were really good at breaking pucks out as a group of five and spreading us out.
“We just stopped playing the way we needed to in order to win the hockey game.”
Glass gave the Predators a 1-0 lead at 15:18 of the opening period. The Avalanche had a pretty solid opening 15 minutes defensively, but Glass found a soft spot in the slot and Colton Sissons got him the puck before Ross Colton was ready to defend him.
Nathan MacKinnon answered for the Avalanche less than two minutes later. He and Mikko Rantanen broke into the offensive zone on a 2-on-1, and MacKinnon stared down his teammate like he was going to pass before snapping a shot from the left wing over Saros’ far shoulder.
It was MacKinnon’s 37th goal of the season. It’s also nine straight games with at least one point. MacKinnon had at least one in 33 of 34 games before a three-game “slump” in the first road trip after the All-Star break, but he’s rolling again.
Glass made it a 2-1 Nashville lead with a very similar play at a similar time in the second period. The Avs again looked pretty sound without the puck much of the period, but Glass got open for a one-timer on a pass from Tommy Novak at 14:26 of the period.
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Former Avs center Ryan O’Reilly made it a 3-1 game midway through the third period with a power-play goal. Roman Josi’s shot from the top of the zone hit the glass behind Alexandar Georgiev and caromed right to O’Reilly at the side of the net for an easy layup.
Novak and Glass added goals late to turn this into a rout.
“I feel like we threw a lot of pucks away into open ice, vacated areas too soon as forwards and didn’t make smart plays through the middle of the ice,” O’Connor said. “When that happens, turnovers are the result. In this league, it’s pretty quick for a team to grab a turnover and put it in the back of the net or create a great opportunity. I think there were way too many of those tonight that we just handed them.”
Nashville came into this game as the hottest team in the NHL with seven consecutive wins. The surge has vaulted the Predators out of a tangled mess of teams fighting for the final playoff spot in the Western Conference. It has given them not only a comfortable cushion for the second wild-card spot, but also the chance to fight for the first one. If the Avalanche can rally to win the Central Division, the Predators could be Colorado’s first-round opponent — just like two seasons ago.
This is the second loss in as many trips to Smashville for the Avs this season. Colorado led with a minute to play in November, but the Predators scored twice in the final 47 seconds to steal a victory.
This one was close for a while, but the home team didn’t need any 60th-minute heroics this time.
“It’s happened to us recently a couple times,” Avs coach Jared Bednar said of the issues with the puck. “You’ve got to put the whole package together.
“After the first period, I thought there was a couple things we could clean up, but then the execution kind of got worse and we never really got to where we wanted to tonight. That was partly because of them and also partly because of us.”
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