In Denver, the Colorado Avalanche doubled-up the Philadelphia Flyers, 6-3, on Friday night.
Cale Makar hit for a double in the win, his 24th goal of the season included, to set a franchise record for goals by an Avs defenseman.
“Mikko [Rantanen] told me on the bench. It’s pretty special,” Makar said. “But those goals go back to the team. It’s awesome to achieve something like that, but at the end of the day we’re focused on this last run in the regular season.”
Pavel Francouz made 29 saves in the Colorado win.
The Flyers’ strikers were James van Riemsdyk, Zack MacEwen, and Max Willman.
“Against a team like that, with that kind of skill, you always have to play smart,” Philadelphia coach Mike Yeo said. “I always believe the best way to stop speed is before it starts, and I didn’t think we did a very good job of that.”
The Avs moved to 46-14-5.
“I thought we had good jump. Pretty good offensively tonight, I thought,” Colorado coach Jared Bednar said. “Didn’t make a lot of mistakes, but some of the ones we made, we gave them some easy goals. I didn’t really like that part of it.”
Nazem Kadri scored to give the Avs a 1-0 lead; van Riemsdyk, hit for his goal to tie the game, 1-1, in the opening period.
“We definitely worked hard,” van Riemsdyk said. “It’s just a matter of executing the little details against a team like that on the end of a back to back [because] you’re not going to have much room for error. Certainly, those little details become critical.”
Colorado reeled off three more goals in the first to take a 4-1 lead in the middle frame.
Makar,J.T. Compher, and Mikko Rantanen were the strikers for the 4-1 lead.
“On an individual basis, I don’t think I had my best game, but at the end of the day that’s why we have depth,” Makar said. “Effort-wise, I thought that it was there all game. I thought we had really good back pressure from our forwards, which helped us on the back end create good gaps, and it kind of all starts from there for us.”
In the middle frame, Kurtis MacDermid scored for a 5-1 lead to Colorado.
“I think [Rantanen’s] been an impact player in the bulk of our games,” Bednar said. “We’ve seen him dominate large portions of a season before, but I think this one he just seems to be real committed on the defensive side of things and really digging into his checking game, and then you can see the numbers he’s putting up offensively still.”
After the Flyers struck twice in the third period to make the score, 5-3, Makar added his second of the night for the 6-3 final.
“I don’t like getting scored on, and I know our guys don’t either,” Bednar said. “So I just thought there was a few things we could have done differently on probably about four chances per period through the first two, which is low numbers. But we’ll take a look at it, try to cure them.”
Carter Hart made 45 saves in the Philadelphia loss.
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