Avs thrash Wild, 5-1

In St Paul, Philipp Grubauer made 19 saves and the Colorado Avalanche defeated the Minnesota Wild, 5-1, on Saturday night.

Matt Dumba was the lone goal scorer for the Wild.

“[Colorado] is good, they’re the class of the League,” the Wild’s Zach Parise said. “They play a good style of hockey. They’re fast, the top line is arguably one of the best in the League, so it was a different type of game that we had played in the first eight.”

Logan O’Connor and Joonas Donskoi scored for the Avs for a 2-1 lead.

“It was nice after some extended time off to have a good O-zone shift there to start and get that goal there,” O’Connor said. “Our line’s mindset was to keep it simple, hound pucks, be relentless out there and use our speed.”

Mikko Rantanen, Brandon Saad and J.T. Compher extended the lead out to the 5-1 final.

“[Minnesota] likes to play a tight checking game. We’ve been trying to increase our tight checking games as of late,” Saad said. “We wanted to play that way, a little stingy game and then capitalize on the power play. Special teams did a great job tonight and I thought 5-on-5 we locked it down.”

The Avs were 2-for-7 on the power play; the Wild were empty in two chances.

“[Seven] penalties probably hurt us as much as anything,” Wild c headoach Dean Evason said. “We had to expend a lot of energy in that area and weren’t able to do obviously what we’ve done a lot of here at the start of the season.

“It’s tough. It gets frustrating because you seem to be chasing the game a little bit because of it. But we’ll do better tomorrow for sure.”

The Avs improved to 6-3-0.

“I think points aside, you just want to keep improving all year long,” Saad said, “It’s a short training camp to get into a quick season, new systems, new team, so you try to mesh and jell as quickly as you can. You just take it game by game. The points are nice and they make you feel good, but it’s really game by game, it’s a process here. We’re looking at the big picture.”

Kaapo Kahkonen made 28 saves in the loss.