In Denver, Ryan Miller made 35 saves and the Anaheim Ducks had different strikers in a 5-2 win over the Colorado Avalanche on Saturday night.
“They’ve got a lot of weapons,” Miller said. “I thought our guys did a great job of doing what they needed to do against this team. They’re going to get some chances, but I had the guys around me. I thought we all did a good job.”
The Ducks snapped a three-game skid with the win.
“I liked scoring four goals on their goalie (Pavel Francouz), I really thought we were due for that,” Anaheim coach Dallas Eakins said. “[Ryan Getzlaf] and I were talking this afternoon saying, ‘We’re due for a game where we score four or five goals.’ There’s too many games in a row where you get chances and they don’t go in.”
The Avs seemed wholly unprepared for the game, or were expecting lighter opposition from the Ducks.
“After such a complete game against [the] Vegas [Golden Knights] in their building (6-1 win Friday), I don’t know if we just expected that it was going to happen if we just showed up tonight,” Avalanche captain Gabriel Landeskog said. “Clearly, that was not the case. It’s unfortunate that in a homecoming after a really good trip (4-1-1) that we showed up like this.”
Nathan MacKinnon and Joonas Donskoi scored for the Avs.
“My biggest takeaway is we didn’t start the game on time, that’s what ended up costing us the game,” Colorado coach Jared Bednar said. “We weren’t ready to play to a high enough level. We were just a little too casual to start the game with the puck mostly. Look at the scoring chances they had in the first period, all on the rush, almost all of them on turnovers, just not skating to check, and they created enough chances to get two goals.”
Ryan Getzlaf, Adam Henrique abd Carter Rowney scored for the Ducks.
“I thought we all did a good job of closing down their quick strike, pop-out plays around the face-off dot. They try that on both sides and they’re quite good at it. We shut that down quite a bit,” Miller said after the win.
Henrique’s goal came just 50 seconds into the game.
“That’s an extremely fast team, and we were able to skate with them,” Eakins said. “When you get up on your first shot against maybe the best team in the League, it puts you in the right mindset.”
Max Comtois put the game out of reach in the third when he made it 4-2 and Jakob Silfverberg potted an empty net goal to seal it.
“We wanted to play better after the little losing streak,” Comtois said. “We wanted to make our game simple. We knew they were on a back-to-back game, so we took over in the first period and after that we closed the game.”
[WATCH: All Ducks vs. Avalanche highlights]
Francouz made 22 saves in the loss.
“It’s a valuable lesson for us this early in the season to realize that we’re a good team, a really good team when we work for it and we go out there and work for one another, play like we’re supposed to, and all of a sudden we’re a tough hockey team to beat,” the Avs Gabriel Landeskog said.
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