In Denver, the Colorado Avalanche scored four times in the middle frame on Thursday night enroute to a 5-3 win over the Nashville Predators.
Logan O’Connor scored twice in the second period outburst.
“I thought we had a great second period, but first period gave up too much, kicked the puck around a lot. A lot of icings. Just not sharp,” Colorado coach Jared Bednar said. “We did some good things on the offensive side of it.
“I thought we had some guys that played outstanding tonight. [Nathan] MacKinnon was phenomenal. Logan O’Connor, phenomenal. Mikko had a pretty good night finishing. We capitalized on our chances in this game, they didn’t. That was the difference.”
Mikko Rantanen also hit for a double in the Avs win.
“You don’t get breakaways too often. I’ve been pretty lucky,” Rantanen said. “Got one against the (New York) Islanders (on Oct. 29). When you’re all alone like that, you might get two in a season, so [you] try to capitalize.”
Colorado improved to 7-4-1.
“I had a lot of speed coming through the zone, so I figured if I could get it around [Lankinen] a little bit I’d have a chance there to beat him,” O’Connor said. “I knew pretty early that that’s what I wanted to do.”
Alexandar Georgiev made 32 saves in the Avs win.
“Me and ‘Nate’ have been playing together for a while now, so obviously there’s some chemistry,” Rantanen said. “Nate’s a really good passer and he finds those seams really well. I thought we did a good job before that moving the puck and maybe they were getting a little bit tired. Then those seams open up, and a great pass from Nate.”
Eeli Tolvanen, Ryan Johansen, and Roman Josi were the Nashville strikers.
“You can’t be a hard team to play against when you give up easy offense like we have multiple times on this road trip, and then particularly tonight,” Nashville coach John Hynes said. “We’ve got to be smarter. I think you look at some of the chances we give up, it’s unacceptable. The awareness, whether it’s some decisions with the puck or it’s decisions without the puck, we give up two breakaway goals in the second period. We’ve got to be smarter than that.”
Nashville dropped to 5-8-1.
Evan Rodrigues added a single marker for the Avalanche, his goal was the final hit in the middle frame to make the score 5-1 to the Avs.
Nashville’s Johansen hit off the power play to get the Preds within 5-2.
“Against teams like that, especially with any team in this league, you go down like that it’s nearly impossible to come back,” Johansen said. “We got to find things in our game that we’re not doing well, and things that we know we’re not doing well, and we got to be better. We got to execute better and try and win some hockey games.”
Josi scored in the third period to make it 5-3, but it was not enough.
Kevin Lankinen made 30 saves in the Nashville loss.
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