In Denver, Philipp Grubauer made 31 saves and the Colorado Avalanche blanked the Minnesota Wild, 6-0, on Saturday.
“Without my teammates it wouldn’t be possible,” Grubauer said. “Everybody’s working hard, everybody’s doing the right things in the [defensive] zone, blocking shots. Incredible work by everybody, sacrificing themselves. Moving forward, as we get closer to the playoffs, that’s the way we need to play. It was two huge games against them. That’s a team we might meet in the playoffs, so we wanted to make a statement.”
This match was over early as the Avs took control and were relentless.
“We were outplayed in all aspects of the game,” Minnesota head coach Dean Evason said. “I can talk to you about different parts of the game, but there’s no one part we did well in two hockey games. We talked hopefully that [Thursday] was a one-off, it wasn’t; we got outplayed again tonight. If there was any positivity, I guess, the third period we asked the group to not check out on each other. We had some pushback in the third. Clearly it was not good enough. We thought our pace was really poor in these two games.”
Gabriel Landeskog and Cale Makar had a goal and two points each in the win.
“This entire homestand we’ve been real competitive and worked real hard and really paid attention to all the little things that we talk about all the time,” Landeskog said. “As a group, we’ve done a good job of stepping up and realizing how big this homestand was, what an opportunity it was for us and to make a push in the standings.”
Makar opened the scoring and Landeskog made it 2-0 to take all the excitement out of the affair.
“I just walked into the middle, kind of saw that their goalie was peeking out of the one side of our guy, so I just tried to rip it short side,” Makar said. “I was aiming for his stick and luckily it went in. We knew these two games were very important, knew they were coming in hot. We wanted to start games strong. We wanted to get on them right away and we were able to do that.”
Mikko Rantanen, Tyson Jost and Devon Toews scored to increase the margin to 5-0.
“I like the fact we’re playing good hockey throughout our lineup,” Avalanche head coach Jared Bednar said. “There were no weak spots in our lineup, being committed on both sides of the puck. We’re starting to put real strong performances together over the course of this homestand. I don’t know if there was a game I didn’t like.”
Valeri Nichushkin finished off the scoring early in the third period.
Kaapo Kahkonen made 36 saves in the loss.
“It wasn’t the ideal the last couple of games for us, but we feel we’re better than what we showed the last two, but you have to do it on a nightly basis and do it against the best teams,” Wild’the s Zach Parise said. “These guys are, no question, one of the best in our division.”
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