Surging Avs move into top wild-card spot
dallas » So it went like this Saturday night: With Colorado short-handed, the Avalanche’s Swedish forward took advantage of a Dallas misplay to gain control of the puck, took off on a breakway and beat Dallas goalie Antti Niemi to the stick side.
As amatter of fact, it went like that twice — with two different Avalanche Swedish forwards.
The similar short-handed goals from linemates Carl Soderberg and Gabe Landeskog helped the Avalanche stretch its winning streak to four with a 3-1 win over the Stars at the American Airlines Center.
Semyon Varlamov again was strong in the Colorado net, making 42 saves and, not so coincidentally, allowing only one goal for the fourth consecutive time during the streak.
“Varly gives off that calm, an aura around him, that nothing really fazes him,” said
Landeskog, the Avalanche’s captain. “It doesn’t matter how many shots he faces. … It’s important to win these ugly games, these 2-1 games, 1-0 games, and I think that shows maturity. That’s something we didn’t do early in the season. Early in the season, we’d open it up and get frustrated. But now we’re finding ways tow in hockey games.”
Varlamov faced 19 shots in the second period alone. Jason Demers had a power-play goal for the Stars in the period, tying it 1-1, but the Stars ultimately went 1-of-5 on the power play and gave up the two short-handed goals.
“I’m pretty tired after back-toback games,” Varlamov said. “We played last night and got here late, and itwas a very short night. This was a tough one as well, and I almost died after the second period. We took too many penalties, and theywere all over us in the second period. Thank God that we scored. Those two (short-handed) goals helped a lot.”
Said Avalanche coach Patrick Roy: “I thought our penalty killing was really good, and we scored two short-handed goals. That gave us a chance towin this game, and Varly was phenomenal out there.”
Varlamov’s fellow Russian, Mikhail Grigorenko, gave the Avs breathing room, making it 3-1 with 5:51 left, and that “ended” Colorado’s chances of winning all four by the same 2-1 score.
The Avalanche, at 26-21-3 and 55 points, leapfrogged the Minnesota Wild and moved into the Western Conference’s first wild-card playoff spot.
The Avalanche played most of the game down a forward after winger Jack Skille fell, slid hard into the end boards and suffered a back injury in the first period.
Although it was the second game in two nights, after losing Skille, Roy still additionally shortened his bench, with defensemen Chris Bigras (7:21) and Andrew Bodnaruck (7:13), plus Grigorenko (9:50) and Andreas Martinsen (7:04) getting limited ice time, especially under the back-to-back circumstances.
“I tried to roll 3½ lines,” said Roy. “Obviously, we have to find ways to win. Now we have two days before the next game (at San Jose). The waywe have been playing, we were in that game, we had a chance towin. I just had tomake decisions who going was the best for the team in order to try to win that thing.”
It worked.