Columbus, Ohio – Technically, the faceoff was a lost one for Avalanche captain Joe Sakic. Except that it went a long way toward his team winning the game Wednesday night.
With the Columbus Blue Jackets on a 6-on-3 power-play advantage with a little more than a minute remaining in regulation, Sakic faced off against Sergei Fedorov in the Avalanche zone.
The puck went backward after it was dropped. But instead of going to a Columbus player, it went harmlessly over the blue line and effectively got back one of the Avs’ two men in the penalty box before Columbus could regroup.
Sakic was responsible for that, pushing the puck forward after the drop from the linesman, when he saw nobody was manning the other point for the Blue Jackets.
“Joe made a great play on the draw. That was a special draw,” Avs coach Joel Quenneville said.
Sakic shrugged off the praise, saying, “Usually, you’ve got to try and draw it back, but when you have three guys back there and they’ve got six … if they had a defenseman over on that side, I would have tried to win it back.”
Foote, Fedorov a fit
What has it been like for Adam Foote and Fedorov – two former members of hockey’s most bitter rivalry in recent years, between Colorado and Detroit, to play with each other in Columbus?
“We both miss that rivalry. We’ve talked about that,” Foote said. “It was easy to get up for those games, you know? Sergei is a great guy. He loves the game and we’re lucky to have him. He’s starting to feel good again after a bad shoulder injury in exhibitions.”
Foote and Fedorov played at the points together in the last couple of minutes in the game, when the Blue Jackets were on the power play.
Footnotes
Foote admits the NHL’s new emphasis on offense and a crackdown on obstruction has hurt defensemen like him. “But we have to sell the game. They had to do it,” Foote said. … Avs defenseman Karlis Skrastins played his 445th consecutive game. He is 41 games shy of Tim Horton’s all-time NHL ironman record for defensemen.
