Playoff opener Thursday night at Nashville
The rest of the way is bonus hockey for the Avalanche and its fans. Colorado’s 14th trip to the Stanley Cup playoffs isn’t about winning the Western Conference finals and playing for the Cup — at least not for now.
For now, it’s about celebrating the Avs making it to the playoffs in Year 1 of their rebuild and doing their best against the Presidents’ Trophy-winning Nashville Predators in a first-round series that begins Thursday at Bridgestone Arena in Music City.
Sunday — less than 24 hours after Colorado beat St. Louis 5-2 in a do-or-die regular-season finale for the teams — the NHL announced the Avs’ best-of seven series schedule with the Predators.
Game 2 is Saturday at Nashville, and playoff hockey returns to Denver with Games 3 and 4 at the Pepsi Center on April 16 and April 18. Few select tickets remain available at altitudetickets.com.
Make no mistake, the NHL’s worst team in the 2016-17 season doesn’t expect to win the club’s third Stanley Cup. But the Avs do expect to play well, and they relish the opportunity to bring playoff hockey back to the Pepsi Center for at least two games.
Game 6, if necessary, is April 22 at the Pepsi Center.
“We worked really hard all year as a team to get where we are. We deserve to be in the playoffs,” said Avs goalie Jonathan Bernier, who figures to start every game in the series because of the knee and groin injuries suffered by opening-night starter Semyon Varlamov. “We went through a lot of adversity this year with injuries and things like that. I really believe we deserve to be where we’re at, and now we have to show what we can do in the playoffs.”
Colorado will be without Varlamov and top defenseman Erik Johnson (fractured kneecap) throughout the series.
“I was really proud of this team before tonight, and then to see them step up the way they did and
finish the job of Phase 1 of our season, I don’t even know what to say,” Avalanche coach Jared Bednar said after Saturday’s big win.
The Avs, the NHL’s youngest team with an average age of 25.8, made a remarkable 47-point improvement from last season, going from 48 to 95 — tied for the fourth-best year-to-year gain in NHL history.
“I’m real proud of the guys who went through what we went through last year. That was a tough year,” said Bednar, who is in his second year as an NHL coach. “At times you go your separate ways, but it takes a lot of commitment to those guys to have the desire to work through a new season with new players and the excitement, I think, of the new players coming in did our team a lot of good.”
The Avs feature 14 new players, albeit a handful who finished with the team last season after playing most of the year in the mi- nors or college.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been part of a group with such team chemistry, and whether we made it or not, I’d still be really proud of this group,” said Colorado left wing and team captain Gabe Landeskog. “This is a big accomplishment to obviously make it after such a tough season last year. But we’re not done.”
Said Nathan MacKinnon, the Avs’ star center: “It’s great. We’re all so young — youngest team in the NHL. We definitely have a closeness that I’ve never experienced before on a team. Everybody is rooting for each other, everybody is pulling in the same direction.”
Nashville advanced to the Stanley Cup Final last season as the Western Conference’s No. 8 seed, so there’s no chance the Predators will look past the No. 8 Avalanche. Colorado was 0-3-1 against Nashville this season, losing 4-1 and 5-2 in Music City and 3-2 in overtime and 4-2 in Denver.
“It’s a completely new season now,” said Avalanche defenseman Mark Barberio. “It was a hard grind to get into the playoffs — it took a Game 82 win to get in — but now we’re in, and Nashville was the eighth seed last year and did a great job to the Final. Anything can happen once the playoffs start.”
“We’re going to embrace the underdog role,” said Colorado defenseman Tyson Barrie. “We’ve got an excited group here, so we’ll try to give them everything they can handle.”