...hits you when it's too late...Hits you when you when your doooowww-ooownnn.
8-1 opponent on the road. Back-to-back for the Canes against a rested team that skates real well. At altitude. #3 goalie in net for the Canes.
Per my game preview blog and my random 80s music rant on Twitter before the game started, the Canes were going to need at least a few players to play great to win Friday night in Colorado. I am not sure anyone in red, white and black did. The best player in the game was by far Matt Duchene. The Canes top players were mostly silent.
Had Semin not been robbed by a post and a goalie on the Canes power play midway through the 3rd period, it would have been interesting to see if the Canes could get 1 more goal and steal at least an OTL point. But the hockey gods were tuned in and for the 2nd game in a row did not allow it to happen in a game in which the Canes did not really deserve it.
It is not that the team was absolutely horrible. The Avs have been doing that to teams of all kinds since the start of the regular season. But there just was not anyone who stepped up to a higher level to boost the team.
A few notes:
--Drayson Bowman. Good for him getting his 1st of the season and doing it near home. The play by JStaal to set this up was incredibly good.
--Jordan Staal. Part of it is that he just cannot buy a break of any kind right now, but for the 2nd consecutive game he was directly involved in a power play goal against when Duchene got the puck in a fairly harmless position on the half wall with JStaal close enough to defend him only to let him get inside of him, walk straight between the cirlces and fire a laser for a goal.
--The first period was disappointing and a bit puzzling defensively. With Peters getting his 1st start of the season, I would have expected and hoped for a fairly buttoned down defensive effort to push as far into the game as possible without giving up much. Instead the 1st period saw 3 (Murphy, Hainsey and can’t remember 3rd) defenseman get caught deep pinching leading directly to odd man rushes the other way. There was also the Murphy turnover followed by a penalty and the 5-on-3 that the team somehow survived. At exactly the point where the team needed to tighten things up to hang around early, it did the opposite and dug a 2-0 deficit at the end of the 1st period and was chasing the game ever after. And most disconcerting, as the game wore on it started to have too many characteristics of the bad part of 2012-13 with Colorado rushes with no forwards in the picture, multiple (Gleason and Murphy for sure) times failing to take away the pass on 2-on-1s, etc.
--Tim Gleason. Like the rest of the defense, Gleason was not perfect and his pairing with Murphy did not seem to click, but I thought Gleason his game was decent when you consider the length of his layoff since being injured about midway through preseason.
--Justin Peters. First, you cannot completely hang this game on him. The Canes had another rough 1st period. And the Avs were the more deserving team over the course of the 60 minutes. As for evaluating Peters, I go back and forth on his game. On the one hand, the team did nothing to give him a 1st period to ease into the game. He also made some pretty good saves being under siege during parts of the game. But he also had bouts with his regular flaws of having shots go through and playing plus 4-5 feet on each side of the net at times. I think it was the 2nd goal where he was 2-3 feet wide of the net when Colorado scored, and he also had at least 2 trickle through him. And he gave up 4 goals and 2 posts which just is not great.
--Andrej Sekera. He played a solid game and had his best game as a Cane offensively springing JStaal with a forward pass who then found Bowman for a goal and scoring 1 himself.
--Power outage. The Canes power play at the midway point of the 3rd period was 1 of the team’s best of the season despite not scoring. Semin hit a post off a faceoff win. He later got robbed by Varlamov at close range. The team spent almost the entire power play in the offensive zone. But the power play managed another 0-for and had a couple key chances to make a difference at the end of both the 1st and 2nd periods and was unable to get on the board or even build some momentum.
The schedule does offer a little bit of relief with only 1 game in the next 6 days which should get more of the day-to-day injury players healthy, but that 1 game is against Pittsburgh which makes for a tough challenge to avoid running the losing streak to 3 games on Monday night.
At some point the Canes best players need to be better than the other team’s best players.
Twitter=@CarolinaMatt63
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