NASHVILLE — The Avalanche’s quest for the Stanley Cup won’t get derailed by Nashvegas, so long as a stooge in a Predators sweater doesn’t gouge somebody’s eye out. Colorado lost goalie Darcy Kuemper on Saturday to the dangerously reckless mayhem committed by Nashville knucklehead Ryan Johansen, but emerged from this NHL playoff game with a 7-3 victory.
“You’re always worried when you see a guy holding his eye and heading off,” Avs coach Jared Bednar said after the Predators tried to goon it up with a Colorado team they have zero shot of beating at hockey.
In an odd way, maybe the classless Predators are helping to build the championship character of the Avs, who didn’t blink when Kuemper got poked in the eye by Johansen late in the first period. Colorado refused to let the unnerving sight of its No. 1 goalie crumpled on the ice in pain deter them from their mission.
Avalanche captain Gabe Landeskog said every team that has won the NHL championship has discussed how “you’re going to have to go through adversity on the way.”
Try to stay classy, Smashville, hard as it might be for sore losers like Filip Forsberg and Johansen to deal with the frustration of three consecutive losses to a vastly superior Colorado team without throwing a tantrum like petulant children.
RELATED: Darcy Kuemper poked in his mask, leaves Game 3 with eye injury
This opening-round series is over except for the goonery.
After the Avalanche took the life out of Bridgestone Arena by jumping to a 2-1 lead, what Johansen did while getting in Kuemper’s grill during the final minute of the opening period was inexcusable.
“I think their guy’s going to the net and trying to cause a little chaos,” Bednar said. “I don’t think he intentionally tried to hurt him. It’s a hockey play, whether the stick’s in his face or not. He’s trying to cause some confusion.”
I ain’t no hockey player, but it seems highly unlikely to me that a trained professional camping out in the crease pokes Kuemper in the face and then proceeds to floss the goalie’s mask with his stick purely by accident.
Hockey 101 stipulates that if a player is issued a stick, he’s responsible for keeping it under control so the blade doesn’t become a weapon. Indiscriminate mayhem is not precise by nature. The intent is to cause a little chaos. And if somebody gets hurt in the process? So be it.
Whether Johansen was trying to harm Kuemper is irrelevant; the point is the Predator in this reckless act didn’t give a hoot what happened. When a pro athlete goons it up and treats a foe with disrespect for his health, there’s no room to claim the resulting injury is an unfortunate accident. A stick doesn’t get stuck in a goalie’s mask without pointing it in his direction.
“I honestly didn’t know that something like this could happen until today. I’ve never seen such an injury. It’s obviously scary that a stick can fit into the cage,” said Pavel Francouz, who filled in admirably between the pipes for Kuemper.
But to be honest, his job was made relatively easy by the shock and awe of Colorado’s unrelenting barrage of goals, including two scores by Landeskog, who was showing no ill effects from recent knee surgery.
With the Avalanche ahead 5-3 and firmly in control late in the third period, Forsberg went headhunting on Logan O’Connor, smashing him into the boards near the Nashville bench.
Unlike the careless stickwork of Johansen, which was a lame attempt at intimidation, the blindside hit by Forsberg was a whiny act of surrender by a Nashville team on the brink of elimination, aching to share a little of its misery.
I went to an NHL playoff game on the first Saturday in May, and one of those unruly bachelorette parties that has made Nashvegas famous broke out, with the Predators all dressed up in their cute yellow sweaters, raising cane by being amateurishly obnoxious, only to stumble into the street before sundown, dazed and lost.
Eye for an eye? Victory is its own best revenge for goonery.
While the Avs won’t be satisfied until they let Smashville crawl back under a slimy rock with one more victory in this best-of-seven series, Bednar is grateful that Johansen’s thuggery apparently did Kuemper no permanent harm. “At least he’s able to see,” Bednar said.
How a team deals with all the aggravation and adversities of a championship run matters. The Avs found a way to win Game 2 despite 49 saves by Nashville goalie Connor Ingram and kept their poise Saturday to take a commanding 3-0 lead in the series.
“For us, it’s about being resilient and sticking together and really just facing that adversity head-on … pulling on the rope in the same direction,” Landeskog said.
In the quest for the Cup, the Avs don’t have time to roll in the stink of these Predators. They need to take out this trash, wash their hands and move on down the road to the Stanley Cup.
You work on staying classy, Nashvegas.
