Please, dude. The faster, the better. The fat lady is doing arpeggios backstage at the Bellagio. The bookies on Fremont Street are busy counting chickens. The Avalanche are eight wins from sleeping with a Stanley Cup and two losses from waking up in Cancun. If Game 1 was an elbow to the nose, Game 2 was a 5-iron to the crown jewels.
“That’s part of the game, when you can (kill off a penalty) and get momentum off of it,” Vegas defenseman Rasmus Andersson told me after his Golden Knights put the favored Avs in an 0-2 Western Conference Final hole — in Denver, for the love of Pete Forsberg — in advance of Sunday’s Game 3 at T-Mobile Arena. “And we just stuck with it.”
The Avalanche power play, meanwhile, is back to being stuck in neutral, spinning burgundy and blue tires in the mud.
Colorado, with an extra man, was already a hard watch with a healthy Cale Makar dancing along the blue line. Without him, it reads a lot like a Sean Payton script: Pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, pass, punt.
Two power plays Friday. At least two chances to build on a scrappy 1-0 lead, to put some space between you and John Tortorella’s master plan. They got nothing. Nada. Zip.
After a workable 25% PP conversion rate in the first two rounds of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, the Avs are 1 for 5 with the man advantage in two games against the Golden Knights. Friday evening offered some serious Dallas 2025 vibes, water torture on ice.
“I think back on some big moments, 4-on-4, we’re in the zone for a minute plus, we get (Nathan) MacKinnon from the slot, we miss the net,” Avs coach Jared Bednar said. “We get (Devon Toews) from the slot, we miss the net, we get (Valeri) Nichushkin coming downhill, we miss the net. We’re going to have to force them to make some difficult saves.”
They’re going to have to make Carter Hart — the Vegas netminder who’s been the best player of these opening two games — actually work for it.
At some point, they’re going to have to make Torts — who’s coaching giant concentric circles around Bedsy right now, minus captain Mark Stone — pull out his whiteboard and start scribbling on the fly. They’re going to have to think about taking Devon Toews (who piled up 29 minutes of ice time) and Nazem Kadri off of the PP unit and plopping bigger bodies in front of a too-hot Hart.
Coming into the Western Conference Final, the Golden Knights were 6-2 when holding playoff foes without a power play goal — and 2-2 when the opposition managed at least one. Yet the Avs’ power play without Makar at the point is more or less what the Broncos’ offense looks like when Jarrett Stidham’s at the controls. Against a real defense, you’re toast.
“I think our PK has been really good all the playoffs, honestly,” said Andersson, who led a grindy Vegas defense with 36 grindier shifts and logged an assist on the empty-netter that sealed a 3-1 win. “We’ve done a good job with getting the momentum back.”
They stuck a proverbial dagger between the Avs’ shoulder blades at the end of the middle stanza. A slashing call on Vegas’ Shea Theodore put Colorado a man up with 1:18 left in the second period while nursing a 1-0 lead.
With 27 seconds left in the frame, captain Gabriel Landeskog corralled a nifty feed from teammate Nathan MacKinnon from behind the Golden Knights goal — but couldn’t land a point-blank look. A Brett Kulak slapper 51 seconds into the third period was stoned by Hart, allowing the guests to keep hanging around. And hanging around.
“I mean, they (the Avs) have a lot of firepower on that PP,” Andersson explained, “so you try to stick to the game plan (from) before and then execute it.”
“Could you see the frustration mounting when they couldn’t convert?” I wondered.
“I mean, that’s a question for them, honestly,” Andersson replied. “When we have a power play, obviously, you always want to score, but … I feel like if you can get some momentum off of it, it’s good.”
The momentum now wears a home sweater that’s roughly the same color as one of Taking an 0-2 deficit into Vegas is like trying to swim the Blue Mesa Reservoir with a bowling ball strapped to your right ankle. Per ESPN, NHL clubs that go down 0-2 on home ice in conference finals eventually lost 20 of 21 series. Colorado had faced an 0-2 hole in its Stanley Cup history nine times prior to 2026 — and went on to win just three of those matchups (3-6).
The Avs wore a look on the other bench Friday as if they knew the odds. A look that said, “We’re cooked” almost as soon as Vegas’ second goal of the night, this one via Ivan Barbashev, lit the lamp with 8:38 left to play.
What’s puzzling is about that is how many times we’ve seen the Avs get punched before — against the Kings, literally, and against the Wild, figuratively — over the past month, only for the guys to remember they’re the Avs, pick themselves off the canvas and start swinging back.
This version of Colorado, by contrast, looks oddly resigned at the first sign of any real trouble. We don’t have Cale. They have Torts. What the heck are we supposed to do now?
That’s on Bednar, Makar, or no Makar. The Avs with Cale believed they could come back from any deficit. The Avs without him seem starved for faith, starved for goals, starved for self-belief.
“Itap a fine margin for error,” Bednar said. “The difference of winning and losing.”
Right now, those margins are mental, messy and massive. And the fat lady is on in five.
