The first sign that something wasn’t right came a few minutes after the puck dropped at 1 p.m. A special weekday matinee on Martin Luther King Jr. Day should have been a treat.
Instead, the Avs operated with the urgency of Eeyore. And the crowd wasn’t exactly buzzing either. For long stretches, the only sound was sticks clicking the ice. Close your eyes and it was hard to tell if this was Ball Arena or a Family Sports Center practice.
“You get the pom poms out. You are a cheerleader,” said coach Jared Bednar when asked how to address the lack of energy. “What are you going to do?”
Monday was painful, but helpful for the Avs, who continued an unsettling trend. The Wild won 3-1, preventing the Avs from jumping them in the standings, while providing a road map for Colorado. Minnesota showed them what opportunistic hockey looks like. The Avs need to watch the tape to see how to capitalize on limited chances, how adding a fourth man in a rush can make the difference with a third goal, for instance.
For 40 minutes, the Avs slogged through slush. They were knotted at 1, hopeful, if not fortunate. Goalie Mackenzie Blackwood denied three power-play goals in spectacular fashion, including one with the splits and another with a glove-hand stab that would make Ezequiel Tovar blush.
Then in a four-minute span to open the third, the Avs got blitzed, yielding two quick scores. Two weeks ago, this deficit would have come across as an annoyance, something to be erased in spectacular fashion. But the Avs have quietly fallen into an ugly habit — the every-other-game-is-good syndrome. Two years ago, no one would have cared, dismissing lapses as part of a long season.
Now? There are no goal flurries to erase those mistakes. At least not like before.
The Avs are 3-4-1 over their last eight games. This matters because of how the season started. Remember those first 25? That served as the yo-yo part of the program with a 13-12 record. It came with reasons — the absences of key players and two goalies who allowed everything into the net except the catch of the day.
But once the Avs made over the men between the pipes — acquiring Scott Wedgewood and Blackwood — they ripped off 12 wins in their next 16 games. In most years, on most days, this Avs roster would rank among the elite. Not in the Western Conference in 2025. The Avs got hot for three weeks, and their latest hiccup means they are holding onto a wild card spot by Nathan MacKinnon’s skate laces.
What they have done in the past won’t work. They cannot have letdowns, especially at home, even if the Wild are the NHL’s best road team.
Monday was a big game. And the Avs came up small.
“Parity in the league is better than it has ever been after COVID. All the teams that were struggling have a lot of good players and they have cap space. So, they are all pushing up. I don’t think it’s just the West. I think it’s both sides. You look at the fight we are in for the playoffs,” said Bednar when I asked about the recent slump.
“There’s gotta be five teams involved in that fight for the wild card and division. You have a bad week, you start dropping.”
The Avs’ ceiling makes days like this frustrating. At their best, like Saturday’s demolition of Dallas, they look parade-worthy. Monday, they looked tired, strapped with heavy legs. They had bad luck, sure, especially on Mikko Rantanen’s rocket off the post over the shoulder of 40-year-old goalie Marc-Andre Fleury.
But it was also a bad look.
“There’s never a margin for error. Obviously, three in a row with division teams, these are all huge. This would have been a real big one to jump (Minnesota) in the standings,” defenseman Cale Makar said. “But we just weren’t fully there.”
The Avs electric-prodded their season with the goalie makeover. But the last 13 days have shown how vulnerable they remain. The Avs are not good enough — they could use another defenseman — or explosive enough to sleepwalk through periods against good teams. Really, any teams.
Minnesota exposed this flaw. As did Winnipeg, Wednesday’s opponent, and Edmonton. You get the picture. The Avs have shown their methods can work, but they have to stick together more than in the past, not letting their minds wander, while hoping MacKinnon works wizardry — his lone goal was jaw-dropping — and Blackwood bails them out.
These last eight games have shown the Avs what the next three months will look like. They can beat any top team. But they are not really better than any of them.
“It is going to be a fight,” Bednar admitted of the playoff race, “to the finish.”
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