That is all that stood between Gabe Landeskog and an ending that would make Disney executives blush.

He became the first professional hockey player to return to the NHL last May after knee cartilage transplant surgery, nothing short of a Hail Mary procedure that saved his career.

This was going to be the bookend chapter for one of the most respected athletes in Colorado sports history. Landeskog, 33, was not going to retire, but he was going to be remembered for this second act forever.

The Captain. And the Cup. Again.

Instead, the clock struck midnight and the valet brought the keys back to a pumpkin.

The Avs became a group of falling stars, going splat and getting swept by the Golden Knights in an unspeakably awful series.

A week ago, the Avs believed they could win another championship. Now, it is fair to wonder if they blew it with this group.

“I mean, you never know if you’re ever going to get the chance again. I think that’s what hurts, right?” Landeskog, always accountable, said in the visiting locker room after the 2-1 Game 4 loss. “Like, it’s hard making the playoffs, and it’s hard winning one round and two rounds, and let alone going all the way, so never know what the next opportunity is going to kind of look like and present itself looking like, but I think for us, believing in this group, believing in the guys that we have in this organization and that will give ourselves the best chance possible year after year.”

In a series that somehow featured no goals from Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar, Martin Necas and Brock Nelson, Landeskog carried his weight. He scored three times, including the lone goal on Tuesday night with 2:03 remaining in the game.

Predictably, Landeskog, a captain for 14 years, took zero solace in his performance.

The Avs began the season on a Stanley Cup-or-bust wagon. Becoming only the seventh No. 1 seed to be swept is not how anyone in the organization expected this season to end.

“Yeah, it’s empty, there’s no other way to describe it, really. Yeah, felt good about our team, still do, but you got to give these guys credit on the other side,” Landeskog said. “They’re good, played hard, Carter Hart, heck of a goalie, heck of a series, so, but yeah, you go from being in the battle and all of a sudden the buzzer goes and season’s over. It’s a weird feeling to try to describe to people, but empty is probably the way to do it.”

The Avs scored seven times in four games. Coach Jared Bednar, who is facing external criticism and questions about his future, praised the Golden Knights’ checking and goaltending.

The Western Conference Final is the farthest the Avs have reached since raising the Stanley Cup after the 2022 season. While this might have been the best chance to win it again, Landeskog wants this group to take another run at it next season.

“I certainly hope so. I believe in that,” Landeskog said.

On a somber night in Las Vegas, a feeling far too common for far too many in this city, Landeskog talked through the pain. This hurt. But he has come back from worse.

“I mean, it’s 32 teams that are trying to win it. It’s hard, but I think at the end of the day, if there’s one thing I learned over the last handful of years, it’s get knocked down, you just get right back up,” Landeskog said. “Yeah, that’s the only way to do it.”

It is time to put this series to bed.

Holding the equivalent of a 16 at the blackjack table, the Avs impressively shifted the odds in their favor Sunday night before revealing why this city is nicknamed Lost Wages with a second-period gag for the ages.

T-Mobile Arena provided a stage for a character-defining victory. Instead, the talented Avs did the unthinkable, proving Game 2 was not a fluke by falling flat on their red faces again.

Sunday night was worse, a new nadir.

The Avs squandered a 3-0 first-period lead. To Las Vegas. Not the 1977 Montreal Canadiens. Not the 1984 Edmonton Oilers. To Las Vegas? Yes, Las Vegas!

All the Avs had to do was tie a knot and hold on for 40 minutes. Instead, they collapsed, went splat in one of the worst playoff periods in franchise history.

Colorado boasted a 74-1 record when leading by three goals in a playoff game. The Knights were 0-19 when trailing by that deficit. So much for the past predicting the future.

Colorado made Las Vegas look like the Legion of Broom. That is all that is left for the Avs now, showing enough pride to avoid the indignity of a sweep.

Does it really matter at this point?

Only four NHL teams have ever won a postseason series of any kind in any round when trailing 3-0. There is no reason to believe the Avs will pull off a miracle.

Not with Cale Makar compromised — he provided a solid effort given his shoulder injury — and Nathan MacKinnon hobbled.

The Golden Knights are a bigger, stronger team.

But the Avs suffered a foundation-shaking loss because of things that go well beyond how players fill out uniforms.

Blame the MacKinnon right knee injury if it makes you feel better. The Avs were sliding into the abyss long before he blocked Shea Theodore’s shot with his leg in the second period, leaving him crumpled on the ice.

Moments after MacKinnon got hurt, Keegan Kolesar deflected a shot off the pipe, then poked the rebound past goalie Scott Wedgewood to tie the score at 3. If you haven’t heard of him, other than his relatives and Golden Knights’ fans, few have. It was his first point of the postseason, eloquently capturing the gravity of the Avs’ meltdown.

Magicians on The Strip don’t make things disappear this easily.

The common thread in the folding? Defensive breakdowns. And Marty Necas and Brock Nelson remain firmly in the witness protection program.

The Avs looked cooked, done in Denver. But in the hours before the puck dropped, they spoke with confidence about overcoming the sordid history of teams dropping the first two home games in the conference finals.

Why? They were 17-2 in their last 19 road games and won twice in Las Vegas during the regular season. That’s something, right? Nope.

“We won the President����ap Trophy for a reason,” forward Logan O’Connor said five hours before the puck dropped. “It����ap time to fight for our lives.”

If you haven’t noticed, numbers are irrelevant in this matchup.

The Knights mocked the trends, while the Avs mocked their own fans.

The Avs didn’t need to be better skaters. They needed to be tougher. They needed to put a fist to a face to stop a rally. An elbow to the chops to slow a rush. A hook to place the Knights on their heels.

Instead, the Avs were left with their heads spinning.

The Golden Knights opened the second period on a power play, and Mark Stone, returning from injury for his first action, scored in 19 seconds.

The place they called the Fortress erupted. The crowd was back into the game. And so were the Golden Knights.

This was the time to make a statement. And the Avs did. With a message so wrong, it is time to wonder how many of these players are the right fit moving forward.

The Avs could not clear the puck, a common theme over the final two periods. William Karlsson scored. It was his first goal. It was also the lone goal of the postseason for Kolesar.

And Tomas Hertl put the Avs out of their misery with the go-ahead shot at the 8:21 mark of the third, pushing the Golden Knights within a whisper of their third Stanley Cup Final in nine years.

Where were the role players for the Avs to shine? I will hang up and listen.

Everything about this loss came with an asterisk. The Avs blew a first-quarter lead. Something they never do. They squandered a second-period lead on Friday, something they had never done.

The Avs were dominant during the season, but no longer resemble that team. They cannot finish. Even when they play well, they cannot sustain it. Talk all you want about the positives, like three starburst goals from Gabe Landeskog, Nazem Kadri and Jack Drury.

They went from great to grate. Again.

It seems unthinkable for a team with this talent. But Colorado is not good enough or tough enough to beat the Golden Knights.

If Las Vegas is “Forged in Gold,” their playoff motto plastered in nearby hotels, the Avs are “Forged in Old.” They look tired, beaten. They didn’t have a shot on goal for nearly 15 minutes in the third period.

With Makar and MacKinnon not themselves, this was the moment for Necas and Nelson to pull their weight. They have been anchors.

Necas had flashes, but still did not score. And Nelson has been arguably the worst player on the ice for either team.

The Avs talked with bravado. The Golden Knights played with it.

“It wasn’t a great first period but we knew we could do it.” Hertl said. “We have done it so many times we never quit. A massive game for us.”

Sam Malinski — of course it was Malinski, the replacement for an injured Cale Makar on Colorado’s top defensive pairing — eyed a loose puck in the offensive zone. He could have charged the right circle, could have made an aggressive play on the puck. For barely an instant, he appeared to have the advantage in a potential footrace to it.

He skidded to a stop instead, then wheeled around, trying not to lose a step the other direction.

“It looks like we’re gonna get to it,” Avalanche coach Jared Bednar said later. “We don’t get to it. They get to it. And that’s how the rush starts to develop.”

Ivan Barbashev carried the puck out of his defensive zone, and seven seconds later, it was in Colorado’s net. For the first time in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, the Avs’ mortality was staring them in the face. Two minutes later, their dream season was on life support.

With two goals in 127 seconds, the Vegas Golden Knights upended the Western Conference Final and left Ball Arena in stunned silence Friday night. The first one leveled the score with 10:45 remaining in the third period of Game 2. The second gave Vegas a 2-1 edge and eventually a 2-0 series lead.

“We felt really good about our game,” captain Gabriel Landeskog said, “and then a short little lapse for two minutes, and they scored two goals.”

Bednar didn’t feel like his team played poorly in a second consecutive home loss. But the hardly perceivable details, the miniscule mistakes piled up to cost Colorado a game that meant everything. There were the opportunities to score an insurance goal before Vegas broke through, the two power plays with a 1-0 lead. And then there were the moments that sparked both Golden Knights goals.

Malinski’s brief hesitation resulted in a 3-on-2 rush for Vegas, with the young defenseman skating for his life to take away an angle from Barbashev. The Avs were scrambling to get back and cover every threat. The puck drifted across to Jack Eichel, who snapped a shot off the far post and into the net before Devon Toews could close in on him — a shot that Knights goalie Carter Hart “saw him working on this morning.”

“Two net drivers (were on the rush),” Avalanche goalie Scott Wedgewood said. “Read that first. (Eichel) kind of stalled. … Just over the pad and the arm, post and in. Perfect shot, but not a perfect goal. Back (side) pressure and feeling that maybe kept me a little bit too much (on the) strong side, and he toe-dragged it. One you want back.”

“We get back in time,” Bednar lamented, “but we don’t close it out.”

The Avs couldn’t manufacture any momentum in the offensive zone as they tried to pull themselves together. So often this season, a lead was definitive. All of a sudden, a tie meant doubt.

“Definitely think it stung,” winger Logan O’Connor said. “Try and be a mature group about it. Try and get right back to our game-plan. I think after the first one, we didn’t do that quick enough. And then the second one happens. And that’s on us to make a better adjustment there and sort of forget about what has happened and move past it. That’s something we can learn from.”

Much like how the first goal stemmed from Colorado’s failure to maintain the zone, the second arose from a botched opportunity to enter it. Valeri Nichushkin was past center-ice when the puck was poked away from him from behind, handing Vegas possession — a moment of weakness for a power forward whose every move is made with conviction, usually.

Then in the defensive zone, Avalanche teammates Toews and Brock Nelson got tangled up along the boards as Toews tried to clear the puck. The attempt was blocked. It took a deflection toward the middle of the ice, where Eichel passed to Barbashev for a one-timer. Both goals rang the post on their way in.

“Some of it is doing the right thing but not hard enough. Some of it is, there’s decisions there, too. Like, Val easily had time to put that puck in,” Bednar said. “And I don’t want to just single out Val, but that was a goal, right? And then we have it back a couple more times — we don’t get it out (of our zone). So we don’t get it in. We don’t get it out.”

“I think our puck decisions lacked some maturity at times,” O’Connor said. “And therefore we deviated from the game plan that had given us some success throughout the game.”

Whatever it was that abandoned the Avs — maturity, decisiveness, discipline — the price to pay was a season on the brink. After 127 seconds of whiplash, they have a two hours of flight time to Vegas to regain their bearings.

It wasn’t enough to play a good game on home ice. Every Avalanche error was sufficiently punished in Game 2.

“It����ap a fine margin for error, the difference of winning and losing,” Bednar said. “There’s obviously things in the game, especially when you gave up two in the third period, that you don’t like.”

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.

“It����ap 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.

“I’m worried, to an extent,” Avalanche fan Jesse Klus confided as we’d huddled at the glass in front of Ball Arena’s Section 140, less than hour before Colorado got jumped by Vegas, 4-2, in Game 1 of the Western Conference Final. “But I have faith. We have a team where if one guy goes down, it’s the next-man-up mentality.”

The next men turned up. Kind of. But none of that adds up to squat if the Avs’ leading men take two-and-a-half periods to get their

“We just weren’t sharp,” Avalanche star Nathan MacKinnon reflected later. “Execution was poor from everybody. Yeah, just gotta be sharper than that.”

Especially when you’re already rolling onto the ice a legend short. In the Avalanche’s first postseason game without defenseman Cale Makar since 2023, Colorado’s other pillars were MIA until the final 5 minutes.

By the time vintage Nate Dogg joined the party, the Avs trailed 3-1 and burgundy and blue faithful were streaming into the aisles.

With 2:20 left, No. 29 spun his defender into a soft pretzel at the right post and fed a cutting Gabriel Landeskog to get the Avs to within a goal. Only a Vegas empty-netter dashed any dreams of a repeat of Minnesota Game 5, and welcome to life behind the 8-ball.

With no Cale, the Avs paled. They passed too much. They got passive. The shooting was lousy, the puck management was spotty, the back checks were inconsistent. The top two lines vanished, forcing coach Jared Bednar to mix and match on the fly.

The Golden Knights’ strategy was simple — get a one-goal lead and park the bus. So why the heck did Colorado oblige them? Over the middle 40 minutes of regulation, the Avs looked flatter than the top of the Grand Mesa. It was if Vegas knew the series started Wednesday and MacKinnon & Company were waiting ’til Friday’s Game 2 to turn the engine over.

“No. 1, you can’t baby the puck around the ice,” Bednar said. “The slower your pass goes to the open man, the quicker (the defense is) going to get out there. I felt like there were opportunities to make earlier, quicker decisions. zip the puck hard.”

The Golden Knights had better juice, better coaching, better goaltending, better special teams and a better plan. They also better utilized the dark arts of playoff hockey, winking their way into some friendly calls.

Somebody needs to give Vegas’ Rasmus Andersson an Oscar, by the way. Best Dive In a Conference Final.

With six minutes left in the second period, Rose Colton pushed Andersson out of the Vegas crease, and the Golden Knights defender went to the ice with, shall we say, more than a little drama.

A flop is a flop is a flop. It worked, getting Colton a roughing call and Vegas an extra man.

Which immediately paid off. The Golden Knights put a second goal on the board when Vegas winger Mitch Marner wrapped a pass behind his back to teammate Pavel Dorofeyev just before Logan O’Connor sent him into the boards. Dorofeyev lost Brent Burns in front of the Colorado net and Scott Wedgewood lost the puck, as a point-blank wrister pushed the Golden Knights’ lead to 2-0 and pushed Ball Arena’s collective blood pressure up about 30 points.

Midway through the third period, Vegas had two goals and an assist from its first and second lines. The Avs had goose eggs.

“(It’s) impossible to replace Makar, of course,” ESPN analyst Ray Ferraro warned me prior to the puck drop. “But if we’re talking one game, that’s survivable.

“I certainly think if (Makar is) out longer-term, or the bulk of this series, it would be a huge advantage, of course, for Vegas. This feels like a massive opportunity for Vegas (Wednesday).”

They took it. The Avs made Vegas goalie Carter Hart work for it in the second period, outshooting the visitors 6-1 in the first 6 minutes of the stanza. But if Hart wasn’t pulling a puck out of the air, a Golden Knight was beating Colorado attackers to loose biscuits in front of the crease, then sweeping them out of danger.

Avs D-man Sam Malinsky isn’t Makar, but who is? Without Cale, it was hard not to miss a presence that’s usually everywhere on the ice — defense, power play, penalty kill, the works.

But it was felt the most on Wednesday at the blue line in the offensive zone. When Vegas didn’t have a generational sniper to worry about, they could pack the slot and the crease the way NBA defenses could collapse on Nikola Jokic in the paint.

And nobody could beat Hart from distance, or even set up a friendly tip, over the first 40 minutes. O’Connor came the closest, but his wrister 5:11 into the contest doinked hard off the left post.

“NO MEANS NO!” Avs fans chanted at Hart, the nimble net-minder with the unsavory backstory.

“NO MEANS NO!”

“NO MEANS NO!”

“NO MEANS NO!”

Yet it was Hart, to the chagrin of a packed Ball and most of America, who controlled the crease and the grease from the jump. It felt a lot like the Kings series, only against bigger bodies, tighter checks and quicker sticks.

The Avs and Golden Knights both fired off 10 shots apiece in a scoreless opening stanza, as the hosts forced more Vegas giveaways (10) while the Fightin’ Torts racked up six blocked shots. At least two or three Vegas defenders seemed form a protective wall in front of Hart whenever the Avs sent the cavalry.

Before Wednesday night, the Avs had only played one postseason game since 2020 without Makar. That was in 2023, Game 5 of that ill-fated Seattle first-round series at Ball Arena, when the Colorado D-man was suspended for an interference penalty earlier in the series. The Kraken held on for a 3-2 win and would win the series in Denver four days later.

Nobody asked for a sequel. Jesse least of all.

Klus is 33. He’s been an Avs fan for 26 years, rooting from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, some 971 miles north of Chopper Circle. Jesse flew in Wednesday morning, dropping $1200 in Canadian dollars on airfare and $700 for Wednesday’s ticket.

Daughter Braeleigh digs Cale even more than Jesse does. She even gave him a bracelet with “MAKAR” spelled in tiny beads last November in Vancouver, outside the Avs’ hotel.

‘I’ll trade you a bracelet for a jersey,” Makar told her. He pulled out a white No. 8 sweater, signed it and handed it over.

“(The Avs) kind of went up and down like waves,” Jesse said of Game 1. “When we had the momentum, we were all over it. Then it dropped off for a while, then back up.”

And your faith?

“Still heavy,” Klus said. “But the effort needs to come heavy like they did in the first period — hard, fast, ready to compete. Thirty-eight shots isn’t bad. But we could’ve had plenty more. And hope to goodness’ sake Cale comes back.”

Amen. Sometimes, it’s just not your Knight. But if you don’t get some juice from the big boys, and fast, it won’t be your series, either.

Not bloody likely.

“What do you say to fans who are freaked out about Cale Makar’s health right now?” I asked defenseman Sam Malinski after the Avalanche practiced Tuesday at Ball Arena.

To this, Malinski gave a considered pause.

“I mean, I don’t know,” the young D-man replied. “I don’t know what to tell them.

“Obviously, it’d be great to have him out here. Can’t replace him, and we’re going to miss him out there. Yeah, hopefully we can still get it done without him.”

Wait.

Without him?

“Any concerns with Cale?” coach Jared Bednar was asked later.

“No, not yet,” Bedsy said.

Hang on.

Not … yet?

Round and round we go.

The truth probably lies, as it often does, somewhere in the middle.

Makar didn’t skate on Tuesday morning. Then again, he hasn’t skated most mornings this month — and he played in every game of the Minnesota series regardless. You’d expect he’ll go — or try to — in Game 1 of the Stanley Cup’s Western Conference Finals against Vegas on Wednesday night.

On the other hand, your eyes don’t lie. The legs look as spry as fudge and twice as sweet. Everything above them

Bad Shoulder? Bum hip? Both? Neither? Makar may be part cyborg, but even the tightest machines can’t hide a busted axle. Every round for No. 8 right now feels like a roll of the dice.

“I mean, you’re probably looking at a smaller list of (who’s) not hurting,” Avs goalie Scott Wedgewood told me earlier this week. “But that’s the joy of this, right?

“I watched Tampa go through this in the (COVID-19) bubble, and same thing — everyone was wrapping it up and going and playing, and that was how you went about it. Game starts, adrenaline takes over for most of the stuff. Which is beneficial for most guys.”

Without naming names, basketball guys tend to make business decisions at this time of year as much as they do team ones. Puckheads? Puckheads go.

The NHL’s bushido, , says you play for a ring now that you’ve come this far — no matter what it takes.

The perfect example of that stared back at us Tuesday, as he does at every morning skate. Avs captain Gabriel Landeskog likely cost himself, and his career, at least three years by playing hurt throughout the 2022 Stanley Cup Playoffs. But the bling was worth it.

The Avs promised to take care of him, to stand by his contract, through thin and thinner. In hindsight, 2023-25 without O Captain, My Captain was one long, weird, winding road. Yet the Avalanche are halfway to the promised land again.

Makar is eligible for a contract extension on July 1. He’s earned the right to be the highest-paid D-man in the world. The Avs have to hold up to him the same promises they did for Landy four years ago while he played through pain to get this franchise a parade. Especially if Makar’s ’26-27 season is delayed, as it very well might be, by surgery.

“I mean, there’s no one with any injury (who’s) stepping out of a shooting lane or anything (because they’re hurt),” Wedgewood continued. “It’s been engraved in (us), and it’s been a whole 20-man roster, every night, doing the job.”

If you’re to keep Makar on a pitch count, at least general manager Chris MacFarland gave Bednar alternatives. Whenever someone on the blue line has gone down over the last four weeks, another D-man has stepped forward to fill the gap. Brent Kulak in Game 5 of the Minnesota series. Brent Burns in Game 4. Malinsky in the Kings series.

Makar’s quiet partner, Devon Toews, has played as well this postseason as he has since the magic carpet ride of four years ago.  Per HockeyStatCards.com, which grades players nightly,

Or maybe we just notice it more when Toews isn’t there. Especially on the penalty kill, such as when he went to the box early in Game 3 against the Wild, giving Minnesota a 4-on-3 power play and a 2-0 lead.

“I feel like for the coaches or the team, there’s not a lot of times where I’m sitting there, and it’s like, ‘OK, there’s 2 minutes left, and who’s on the ice?'” Wedgewood said. “It’s always just this: ‘Whoever’s out here, I trust my teammates.’ But when you have certain players out there that do a job so well and then also produce and also be a presence in the room and everything — there’s just a level to that, obviously, that certain people can do. And (Toews has) been one of them that’s done it all year.”

In mid-May, just about everyone’s dragging a body part that could use a month of rest. When Makar’s out there sacrificing 2027 and 2028 for a ring in 2026, it’s on the rest of the room to shoulder the load.

“I mean, I don’t know if pressure is the right word,” Malinski said. “We’re all going to have to play a little bit more and we’ll be challenged with different situations — I might have to penalty kill or whatever it is. But, yeah, I wouldn’t say we feel pressure. We’re just going to have to step up.”

You don’t lift Lord Stanley unless everybody’s pulling on the same rope. Even if it’s only with one arm.

Makar Macouldn’t.

No. 8’s shifts became as labored as Homer Simpson running up five flights of stairs. Cale Makar, the Avalanche’s star defenseman, didn’t even come out to the bench at the start of Game 5’s epic overtime finish. At one point, All Hail Cale a wince you felt from a distance, pain even national TV cameras couldn’t hide.

How do you know when it’s your year? When it’s your Stanley Cup? While the best D-man on planet Earth could barely hold a stick, Brett Kulak sticks it to The Wall of St. Paul.

“You always like to dream about it, but like you say, the player I am, I’m not the guy everyone’s looking down the bench at, like, ‘All right, get out there and go win it for us,'” said Kulak, the hard-charging but soft-spoken D-man whose fourth career postseason goal — in 107 playoff games — was his biggest, an overtime winner that sent Colorado to the Western Conference Final for the first time since 2022.

“No, it’s been good. It was a tough series. That’s a good (Minnesota) team over there. So for us to play the way we did and get the job done — and then, just for me, (it was) a special goal in my career, for sure.”

A gorgeous one, too. A rocket launched from the right face-off dot, set up by a whirling Martin Necas, who’d jumped onto the ice when he realized the Avs were a man short.

“I just saw (that) we’re coming back in our zone. And, you know, we had four guys, so I was like, ‘Might as well jump there, you know? I don’t care,'” Necas recalled later when asked about his second helper Wednesday. “So yeah, it worked out … great play by (Parker Kelly), banging it to me, and then I just did whatever I saw.”

He went around Wild goalie Jesper Wallstedt’s net, came out the other side, and saw Kulak in the face-off circle.

“We built on momentum from the third (period), carried (that) into OT,” Kulak said. “And just for me personally, Marty carried it up, (got) his wheels going around the O-Zone, and I just kind of was able to slide into an open spot in the weak side of the ice, and credit to him. (He had) good vision and put it right in the perfect spot for me to get a good shot.”

And even sweeter redemption. Earlier in the evening, for the second Minnesota goal of the night with 8:57 left in the opening period. Colorado stared at a 3-0 deficit after the first intermission. It was Game 3’s dumpster fire, compressed into 20 minutes of offal.

“Yeah, I mean, you get buried a couple goals (down) in the first, and they’re all over it,” Kulak said of the Avs’ crummy start. “You’ve got no time and space, and you feel like it’s going to be a long night.

“(So you) just kind of chip away, one shift at a time, and you start to get the momentum, and things start to shift.”

Trailing 3-0, a defense that had half a Makar or no Sam Malinski at all somehow held the Wild to seven shots over the final 44 minutes.

“(That’s) huge, yeah,” said coach Jared Bednar, whose team improved to 8-1 through its first two playoff series of 2026. “I mean, you can’t understate that.

“When you look at (Brent) Burns’ series, I mean, because you’re without (Josh) Manson early. (Manson) comes back, you’re without (Sam) Malinski, you’ve got Cale fighting through stuff. I mean, there’s only six (defensemen), right? And guys need to step up. We were four guys rolling on the bench … I think Burns’ (Minnesota) series was incredible, and obviously Kulak’s was the same.”

“So how is Cale feeling?” I asked.

Bednar paused.

“Cale is OK,” the coach replied.

He sure didn’t look it late. Especially after Makar and Minnesota’s Mats Zuccarello had collided behind the net in the third period. The Avs’ star defender quickly grimaced, dropped his stick and appeared to grab his right shoulder in agony. Then he headed to the tunnel. Gingerly.

“It’s not just one guy who steps in and takes over the minutes,” said Kulak, now tied for second this postseason among Avs defenders in points (five) while ranking third in ice time per game (20:48). “I think everyone has to chip in, and the whole team has to just play solid hockey.”

“Was that your first (goal)?” MacKinnon asked Kulak during their news conference.

“Yeah,” the defenseman replied.

“So another guy,” MacKinnon said with an almost bubbly grin. “I mean, that’s a great stat. You know, that’s the stat you want to see — team stats and, you know, everyone’s chipping in.”

How’s this for chipping in? Kulak is just the seventh guy in NHL history to have his first goal for a new club be a series-ender in the postseason. He’s also the 16th different Avs player to score this series, tying an NHL record.

“I love it, I love it,” Bednar said of scoring depth that overwhelmed a Minnesota roster without Joel Eriksson Ek and Jonas Brodin. “That’s hard to beat.

“When you have different guys stepping up every night, you can’t key on one guy. There’s no sort of coming in to play our team and (saying) like, ‘Well, if we shut down the (Nathan) MacKinnon line, we’re going to win.'”

These Avs can beat you with speed, with size, with strength, with cunning, with defense, with goaltending, by land, by air, or by sea. General manager Chris MacFarland’s trade deadline additions — Nicolas Roy, Nazem Kadri, Nick Blankenburg — loom larger by the week, letter-perfect finishing touches to a core of Makar, Nathan MacKinnon, Necas, Gabriel Landeskog and The Lumberyard between the pipes.

And there’s Kulak, who came over from Pittsburgh in the Sam Girard swap, now only the third guy in NHL annals to play with MacKinnon, Connor McDavid and Sidney Crosby. The 32-year-old’s last two postseasons ended in the Stanley Cup Final with the Edmonton Oilers. Dude knows what this is supposed to look like. What it’s supposed to feel like.

“I think at (this) point, it just becomes a group effort throughout everybody that’s going,” Kulak said. “I mean, Cale is battling out there. He’s playing really well, and it (stinks) having Sammy (Malinski) out. He’s a big piece of the team, too. So when guys are coming and going, and you’re missing a couple bodies here and there, other guys just step up and fill the void.”

Makar somehow logged 25 minutes Wednesday night while being held together by duct tape and piano wire. Manson toughed it out through 19:19. Burns, who was born in 1985 but wears a beard from 1885, put in 19:47 of ice time. In May and June, it doesn’t matter who carries the flag, just so long as that bad boy, however tattered, gets over the line.

Nathan MacKinnon wristed home the game-tying goal with 1:23 left in the third period of Game 5 against the Wild on Wednesday, to the slimmest of windows on the top left shelf to beat Minnesota goalie Jesper Wallstedt.

The score, which came in a six-on-five in an extended shift for Colorado’s top line with Avs goalie Scott Wedgewood pulled, completed Colorado’s comeback from a 3-0 deficit. It forced overtime in the Avs’ 4-3 victory that was capped by Brett Kulak’s game-winning goal in the series-clincher to send Colorado to the Western Conference Final.

“I was exhausted to say the least,” Landeskog said of his reaction to MacKinnon’s goal. “Just such a special player, making a special shot, at such a clutch moment.”

MacKinnon’s shot also left forward Parker Kelly, who was watching from the bench, in disbelief.

“Unbelievable,” Kelly said. “I mean, it didn’t really look like there was much (space) there… and you just see it kind of hit the top of the net. Just, what a shot. Elite player, big-time player, gamer — that����ap why they call him the Dogg, man. He shows up in those big moments. And we’re super fortunate to have him.”

MacKinnon got the puck in the left faceoff circle off a feed from Martin Necas, and the generational center had plenty of time to decide what to do with it. Wild defenseman Jake Middleton went down to the ice in front of MacKinnon to attempt to block a low shot, just before MacKinnon lasered the puck to the slimmest of spaces above Wallstedt’s right shoulder.

“I just saw a little daylight and I just threw it there,” MacKinnon said. “It doesn’t always go where you want it to. I’m happy it did then.”

MacKinnon’s seventh goal of the playoffs left Wild head coach John Hynes metaphorically shrugging his shoulders at the precision of a player who led the NHL with 53 goals in the regular season.

“It was a shot outside the dots from a bad angle,” Hynes said. “It was a heck of a shot by an unbelievable player. When you look at where it goes in, he had a pinpoint shot. (The Avs) had a net front, a bumper player, a backside player. We had all those areas covered, and MacKinnon made a heck of a shot.”

Landeskog said that at the time of MacKinnon’s goal, the Avs weren’t thinking about time ticking away toward a looming return trip to Minnesota for Game 6.

“(Our mindset was) just go,” Landeskog said. “We had a plan, six-on-five. Obviously, we were able to get some momentum (with Jack Drury’s goal a couple minutes earlier). We know those guys (for Minnesota) had been in for a little bit. They’ve been playing a lot all series. So we were able to find a way to get the puck in Nate’s hands.”

MacKinnon said the energy in the arena after his goal was a memorable moment in his career. And after he lit the lamp, the Avs were playing with house money heading into overtime, a flip of the script after Landeskog admitted the Avs were “shell-shocked” by the Wild taking a 3-0 lead in the first period. That early stumble resulted in head coach Jared Bednar pulling Mackenzie Blackwood from the net in favor of Wedgewood.

“I could definitely feel (the energy), and hear it,” MacKinnon said. “… It was a really cool moment. And obviously coming back from 3-0, we felt good going to overtime.”

With Wednesday’s third-period goal, MacKinnon has now scored in six straight games, the second-longest playoff streak Valeri Nichushkin (2024), Claude Lemieux  (1997) and Joe Sakic (1996) are all tied for the record with seven straight. ]]> 7757660 2026-05-13T23:02:25+00:00 2026-05-14T06:16:43+00:00 /2026/05/09/avalanche-wild-game-4-prediction-goalie/ Sun, 10 May 2026 04:54:40 +0000 /?p=7754098 ST. PAUL, Minn. — The safest way to hit it out of the Wild? Trust your Wedgie.

“We needed to do something to get our guys fired up and going,” Avalanche coach Jared Bednar said of his decision to pull goaltender Scott Wedgewood and replace him with Mackenzie Blackwood during a 5-1 loss at Minnesota late Saturday night. “I was hoping that would be part of it.”

Life in the woodshed wasn’t all Wedgewood’s fault. Kirill Kaprizov spent so much time in the Avalanche crease Saturday, Bednar could’ve charged him rent. The Avs got outhit, outworked, outhustled, out-detailed, out-everything-ed. Colorado takes a 2-1 series led into Monday’s Game 4. Minnesota took Saturday’s head-to-head count on blocked shots (15-8), special-teams goals (2-1), takeaways (7-3) and hits (39-25).

Game 3’s stinker was a team effort, in all the worst ways possible. Minnesota had too many open men in front of the net. The Avs were second too often to 50-50 pucks, second too often to the corner, second too often on the little things that add up in a series this close. It was Nuggets-Timberwolves Game 6 on ice. Not that anybody wanted a sequel.

“We didn’t play good enough,” Bednar said, “to win that hockey game (Saturday) against a desperate team.”

Wedgewood was nowhere near good enough, either, don’t get this wrong. He lost his stick on one goal. On another, he lost a puck the way an outfielder loses a flyball in the sun. With the Avs trailing 3-1 and Wedgie replaced by Blackwood in net, it took the latter all of 20 seconds to give up the fourth goal of the evening and make a steep climb steeper.

Sure, Blackwood stopped 12 of the 13 shots he faced. Yep, he steadied the ship late during some choppy waters.

But ask yourself a question: In a Game 4 that will determine whether this is a series fought to the bitter end or becomes another quick Avs tune-up, would you trust Wedgewood or Blackwood to carry you over the line on the road? To stop the bleeding versus a Minnesota bunch with 18,000 Midwesterners at their back, screaming at every shift change?

When they said this series could use a little more character, the hockey gods gave us Hannibal Lecter. There were about 17 things you’d take back from this one, in a heartbeat. Any Avs postseason game refereed by Kelly Sutherland automatically starts with one eyebrow raised. But Colorado didn’t help itself for a lot of the same reasons the Nuggets didn’t on the other side of the river. Effort, mostly. Coaching. Stuff in the margins. Nick Blankenburg has been fine in the D-corps, but from a physicality standpoint, Josh Manson can’t get back quickly enough.

At the 5:06 mark of the first stanza, Avs forward Logan O’Connor lost the puck and poked at Jesper Wallstedt’s stick as he slid behind the net. A donnybrook between Parker Kelly and Ryan Hartman at the boards broke out, setting up matching two-minute minors.

The Avs let things snowball from there. Kaprizov opened the scoring with a backhand deke that wrong-footed Wedgewood 17 seconds into the 4-on-4. With the Wild up 1-0, Devon Toews was whistled for hooking Matt Boldy with 4:08 to go in the opening frame, giving the hosts a 4-on-3 look and a leg back into the series.

Wedgewood saved a Mats Zuccarello snapper, but lost his stick somewhere along the way. When Minnesota cycled the carom back to Quinn Hughes, the Olympic star didn’t miss. The D-man glided untouched between the faceoff circles and lasered a wrister over Wedgewood’s non-stick stick hand while Kaprizov snuck into the crease to screen the netminder’s line of sight. By the time Wedgie saw the biscuit, it was tickling the twine behind him as the hosts extended their cushion to 2-0 with 3:16 left in the period.

Minnesota notched its first power play of the second stanza 3:39 into the period and twisted the knife less than a minute later thanks to a flukey deflection and a killer finish. Toews’ deflection bounced high from the left face-off dot toward Wedgewood’s net — but before the goalie could control the rebound, Hartman swatted it like a pickleball volley in mid-air and past the Colorado goaltender for a 3-0 Minnesota lead.

Bednar yanked Wegewood immediately after and replaced him with Blackwood, the first time he’d pulled the former since a disastrous start at Ball Arena against Pittsburgh — — back on March 16. Wedgie gave up three goals on five shots that evening over 13 minutes between the pipes. It wasn’t just  No. 39’s first action of the postseason — it was his first stint in 25 days.

“BLAAAACK-WOOD!” the locals chanted sarcastically.

“BLAAAAACK-WOOD!”

It was a “message ” move on Bednar’s part, to be sure, and just like that Penguins tilt, things didn’t improve much. The Avs finally got on the board via their second power-play chance on a Nathan MacKinnon goal that had an Artturi Lehkonen vibe to it. With 6:49 left in the stanza, the Colorado forward snuck in at the right post behind a Gabe Landeskog sandwich. Landy had fallen on Wallstedt in the net, while Minnesota D-man Daemon Hunt had fallen on the Avs captain, allowing the puck to squirt loose and evade everybody but No. 29, who chopped it over the line to light the lamp.

Back came Minnesota less than 30 seconds later. Brock Faber got loose up the middle of the ice on a Wild break, deflecting Vladimir Tarasenko’s snapper on Blackwood stick side for a 4-1 lead with 6:29 left in the middle frame.

As for what’s next, best strap it down. This is the Wild’s 10th postseason series in which they opened with an 0-2 deficit. They wound up losing eight of those first nine matchups and only three of those nine made it past Game 5. The only series they turned around? A first-round tussle with Colorado in 2014, one Mikko Koivu, Zach Parise and company stole in seven.

“I thought we came out,” Faber said, “with desperation.”

And this party’s only about to get Wilder. During the regular season, Wedgewood started 22 games on the road, posting a 16-4 record, a 2.01 goals against average (GAA) and a .923 save percentage and two shutouts.

Blackwood away: 18 starts, a 13-3 mark, a 2.19 GAA, a .921 save rate and … two shutouts.

When a push comes to shove … trust your gut. And your eyes. The last eight times Wedgewood’s given up three goals or more in a game, he put a 6-2 record over the eight games that immediately followed. And surrendered two goals or fewer in five of them.

“We’ll have a decision to make (in goal),” Bednar admitted. “But we have a decision to make every night. Some of them are easier than others.”

This one’s a cinch. Dance with the goalie who got you here. Just because Wedgewood lost his stick doesn’t mean he should lose his pipes.

“How do you respond to playoff pressure?” I asked Necas, the Avalanche’s swift winger, after practice at Family Sports Center, as Colorado prepped for Game 1 of its Stanley Cup Playoffs showdown with Minnesota. “You looked a lot more relaxed later in the Kings series …”

“Yeah, I think …” Necas started.

Beard break. Burns, unwrapping his gear to Marty’s left, leaned in, mighty whiskers first, from the locker next door.

“I wanna hear this dumb answer from this guy,” the 41-year-old Avs defenseman chuckled, beaming like a wicked uncle.

To this, Necas just grinned.

“No, I think it’s good,” Necas continued. “Pressure is a privilege, right? So it’s nice to be in this spot. And obviously, we …”

Burns rose, stretched to his full 6-foot-5, and headed for the nearest exit.

“You said  (if) you wear those loose pants, you get better blood flow, you’re feeling good,” the big man cracked as he left.

“Once you get to 40,” Necas countered, “you get nervous, but …”

Another grin.

Where were we?

“No, I think it’s great,” Necas said.

“You know, it’s great to be in the spotlight, to be honest. We’re all enjoying it.”

You could see it in 88’s eyes. You could see it in the way they lit up after Nathan MacKinnon’s power play goal last Sunday against the Kings — the Avs’ first in 10 postseason attempts with the extra man.

Necas didn’t get an assist on the scoresheet, but Nate Dogg’s look on the one-timer couldn’t have happened without him. Marty crashed the crease as captain Gabriel Landeskog set up below the net, occupying a Los Angeles defender and opening up a shooting lane for MacKinnon to tickle the twine.

“I feel like, as the (Kings) series went on, we had a lot of chances,” said Necas, who put up two points for the series but was scoreless on 12 shots. “Obviously, we didn’t score as much as maybe we wanted to (on the first line), but just like (coach Jared Bednar) says, defense first. That’s what we did. The chances were there, and we’re going to keep scoring.”

Necas has played in 11 Stanley Cup games with the Avs since coming over in that tectonic trade with Carolina 17 months ago. They’re 7-4 in those tilts. Colorado’s 4-1 whenever 88 records at least a point in the postseason.

Necas doesn’t have to be for a roster this deep to snatch Lord Stanley again.

He just can’t be

“I thought his series was OK,” Avs coach Jared Bednar said of Necas’ performance versus the Kings. “You know, I thought he was committed on the defensive side. He didn’t make any glaring mistakes (that) led to goals against or high-danger scoring chances against.

“So he was a committed guy, and he worked hard. He’s got to get a little harder, I think, as the playoffs go on. I think there’s a group of guys in our room that have to do more and can get a little harder to play against in different areas.

“But I will say that, No. 1, commitment, work ethic — that stuff was there. I think they can impact the power play a little bit more by some better decisions and whatnot.”

One of the luxuries of playing the Kings first was that everything felt like a tune-up. A wade into Cup waters to get used to postseason physicality, postseason grit, postseason checking, postseason calls (or lack thereof), postseason pace, postseason adjustments, and postseason special teams.

The Avs could play with their food on the power play until 2036 and still beat Los Angeles nine out of 10 times. The Wild, though, are a different beast.

Dallas scored 10 of its 15 goals with the extra man, landing six more power-play scores than Minnesota while going down in six games in the first round. One PP goal won’t win this series when the margins are this narrow just about everywhere else on the ice.

“And we saw (Necas) kind of break out in Game 4 a little bit offensively,” Bednar added. “So it took a couple games to figure that out. That timeline’s got to get shorter — learning more about your opponent … game by game, period by period, to try and break through.”

With the Avs rested and Minnesota surging, the second round also offers Necas a chance to either slay several dragons at once — if his blade’s sharp.

The first is the whisper that Marty’s game, with its speed and grace in open space, doesn’t translate to the playoffs the way, say, Logan O’Connor, Artturi Lehkonen, Nicolas Roy and (a healthy) Nazem Kadri do.

Few skaters in the Avs locker room can be as pretty with the stick as Necas at full tilt. But this is a time of year when the ability to stab, chop, push, and shovel your way to ugly goals means even more.

Meanwhile, the man he replaced, Mikko Rantanen, has put up 15 points with the extra skater in the playoffs during that same span. Not that anyone’s counting, mind you.

Of course, a decent showing against Minnesota in the biggest series of the Cup’s second round would only toss more dirt on a grave that Mikko has been digging these last few days in Dallas.

The Wild cooked Moose’s goose before the Avs could get the chance. (eight years at $12 million per season) is now being weighed in Big D the way Jamal Murray’s and Christian Braun’s deals are being scrutinized here — and for the same reason.

In the first round, Mikko scored once, logged six helpers and put up seven points in six games with a negative-8 plus/minus. The cherry on top: The NHL fined Moose $5,000 Friday morning for a cross-check on Minnesota’s Kirill Kaprizov to take with him to Cancun.

“Yeah, I don’t really pay attention to those (comparisons to Rantanen),” Necas told me. “But obviously, people are going to make those. I’m just here to do my best. And to help this team.”

No time like the present. If pressure’s a privilege, so is a parade.