Avs should break up top line
Easier for teams to defend against trio if there’s no scoring from other players
On second thought, maybe loading up a forward line with your three best players wasn’t such a good idea after all.
That’s sort of the conclusion the Colorado Avalanche are coming to these days. Sure, Mikko Rantanen might win the Art Ross Trophy, and Nathan MacKinnon could finish the season with 120 points and Gabriel Landeskog could hit the 50-goal mark.
But neither of those things will mean much if the one-line team, which is barely hanging onto a wild-card spot in the watereddown Western Conference, ends up missing the playoffs.
Having lost nine of their previous 10 games prior to Monday night’s 6-3 win over Toronto, that’s where Colorado seems to be headed — unless their top guns stop shooting blanks.
“I think they’re one of the best lines — if not the best line — in the league,” said head coach Jared Bednar. “So if we’re going to get out of this thing, we’re going to lean on those guys heavily.”
Or maybe, just maybe, it’s time to spread the wealth.
It’s one thing to have three players ranked in the top-20 in scoring. But when the team’s next-best forward has managed just 25 points all season, it’s a sign that what once was a threepronged attack has turned into a three-headed monster. After all, the game plan for beating the Avalanche is pretty straightforward and simple: shut down their top unit and you pretty much shut down the entire offence.
Then again, when Rantanen, MacKinnon and Landeskog are averaging upwards of 22 minutes — five more minutes than the team’s next-highest forward — it’s easier said than done.
“You know, a team that’s running away with hockey, that’s not what they’re doing,” said Maple Leafs head coach Mike Babcock. “They’re spreading it out and just have good players on every line. Those are the ones who are playing a long time in the spring, too.”
Well, that’s not exactly true. While most teams have balanced scoring, the Calgary Flames are leading the West with their top three goal-scorers (Johnny Gaudreau, Sean Monahan and Elias Lindholm) playing on a line together. The same goes for the Boston Bruins, who defeated the Leafs on Saturday thanks to their super line of David Pastrnak, Patrice Bergeron and Brad Marchand.
The difference is that Calgary also has Matthew Tkachuk (54 points), while Boston has David Krejci (35 points) and Jake DeBrusk (14 goals) to supplement the offence.
Colorado, meanwhile, has a bunch of players you’ve probably never heard of.
While Rantanen (20 goals and 68 points), MacKinnon (26 goals and 66 points) and Landeskog (27 goals and 51 points) have combined for 48 per cent of the team’s offence, the Avalanche’s next-highest scorer is Carl Soderberg with 12 goals and 25 points.
That’s less than half of what Landeskog has produced. And lately, the gap is becoming even wider.
Soderberg has two goals and two assists in his previous 16 games. Adam Kerfoot, who has 24 points, has one goal and three assists in his previous eight games. Meanwhile, JT Compher has gone seven games without a goal, Matt Nieto has gone 16 games without a goal, and Matt Calvert has one goal in his past 12 games.
It’s another way of saying that if Colorado’s top line isn’t scoring, then no one is. Even then, with the way the team’s goaltending has been playing of late, it’s still sometimes not enough.
“Yeah, we feel a lot of pressure,” said MacKinnon, who has two goals and seven points in the past five games. “If we’re going to give our team the best chance to win, we’re going to have to produce.”
“I think it’s like we saw earlier in the year, other lines were helping us a lot,” said Rantanen, who has three goals and six points in the past five games. “I don’t think we’re playing at that level that we were playing a few weeks back. So they have to be a little bit better and help us out more.”
That might be too much to ask. After all, it’s not like Kerfoot and Soderberg are proven scorers who are suddenly in a drought. This isn’t William Nylander who is slumping.
If Colorado wants to receive secondary offence, they might have to break up their top line to do so. It might not result in any scoring titles. But it could lead to a playoff spot.
“That would probably be a good thing too,” MacKinnon said of playing away from Rantanen and Landeskog. “It would be good to spread it out. We tried it a little bit this year and kind of kept coming back to the three of us. We tried it at home for a few periods and it was OK, but (coach Bednar) just put us back together.
“It’s definitely something we should try in the future if we don’t win here.”