In Denver, the Colorado Avalanche’s Gabriel Landeskog hit for a hat trick and the Avs rallied from a three-goal deficit to defeat the Winnipeg Jets, 6-3, on Friday night.
“You learn pretty early on, sometimes in this league [goals] come in bunches,” Landeskog said. “And sometimes when they’re going in for you, you want to keep doing what’s working for you, and for me that’s going to the net and trying to get my stick on the puck and deflect pucks.”
The Jets took a 3-0 lead in the first period, and then just disappeared.
“A 3-0 hole is hard to come out of, but I felt like we were doing some good things in creating some chances at the start of the game,” Avalanche head coach Jared Bednar said. “We knew if we corrected a few things on the defensive side we’d continue to get some of those chances. We’d have to beat Hellebuyck and capitalize better than we did in the first. We had some missed execution.”
Nathan MacKinnon hit for a double in the Avs win.
“[MacKinnon] is a world-class player and one of the best in the league,” the Avs’ Andre Burakovsky (goal) said. “Just the things he does out there. He makes it easy for me too. … He does a great job holding on to the puck and create for the other two guys.”
Pavel Francouz made 25 saves in the Colorado win.
The Avalanche moved to 38-10-4.
“They’re a fast team,” Winnipeg’s Pierre-Luc Dubois said. “I thought in the first what we did well was we stopped them, we get the puck and we go. And then in the second and third, you give them 40 shots from the outside, at some point one’s going to go in. I thought we just slowed it down and tried to find perfect plays. They’re tough to play against. The more you sit back, the more they get opportunities and they just feed off that.”
The Jets fell to 22-21-9.
“Disappointing, I think, would be the biggest takeaway for us,” Jets coach Dave Lowry said. “I liked the way we played the first. I liked the way we stayed with our game. And then the game got away from us. Their top players took it to another level. They started putting pucks in, they started using their speed. They started creating pressure, creating turnovers.”
Kyle Connor, Evgeny Svechnikov, and Adam Lowry scored for the Jets in the first period.
“It’s tough to swallow,” Adam Lowry said. “It’s frustrating. You come in against the Avs, the best team in the league, and build a 3-0 lead after the first period … collectively and individually, it’s about accountability and looking in the mirror and trying to find what you bring to the table, what you can contribute collectively and go from there and build it out as the season wears on. We’re over halfway, and you’d like to have that ironed out, and clearly that’s an area we still need to get sorted out really fast here.”
Connor Hellebuyck made 36 saves in the Winnipeg loss.
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