An Avalanche team with one-third of their best-in-hockey top line scored five goals on the Blackhawks.
An Avalanche team with two-thirds of that line, with Mikko Rantanen returning from injury to rejoin Nathan MacKinnon, scored seven goals on the Hawks.
The Hawks, who entered the home-and-home having allowing just 10 goals (excluding empty-netters) over their past six games and sporting the No. 1 and 12 goalies in the league, suddenly looked like a paper towel trying to contain an oil spill.
They were completely outmatched and thoroughly shredded by the NHL’s hottest up-and-coming team.
“They’re a very fast team, and they’ve got some players on the point that can really jump into the play and make life difficult for you,” Patrick Kane said after Saturday’s 7-3 rout. “Even when they make some plays and turn it over, it seems like they backcheck pretty well, too. All around they work hard and play fast, and [that’s] a lesson we can take.”
At least the now-struggling Hawks can take pride in one thing: their franchise remains a model for the Avs.
A model the Avs are trying to — and, it appears, soon will — replicate.
Saturday’s game in Denver was marketed as “Division Rivalry Night,” complete with a pregame video describing the intensity of the Central Division and “Beat the Blackhawks” giveaway posters handed out to fans.
The Avalanche mascot’s flag for the pregame hype up reads “Beat the Blackhawks.”
— Ben Pope (@BenPopeCST) December 1, 2019
The Avs have deemed this Division Rivalry Night and are really playing up the occasion of the Hawks being in town. pic.twitter.com/7yqZlMXq04
Even with the Hawks four years removed from their last playoff series win and sitting dead last in the Central right now, it’s still a special occasion for smaller markets when the Hawks — indisputably the NHL’s Team of the 2010s, even if the latter part of the decade hasn’t been so fruitful — come to town.
It wouldn’t be surprising, though, if the roles are reversed over the next decade. The Avs have all the same pieces in place that the Hawks did in 2009.
Come 2029, there’s a very non-zero chance Colorado will have emerged as the NHL’s Team of the 2020s.
The Avs currently sport a 16-8-2 record and plus-22 goal differential, second-best in the league, despite fielding the NHL’s youngest roster (average age: 25.7) and having played the third-toughest strength of schedule so far.
MacKinnon — on pace for a 128-point season after finishing with 99 and 97 the past two years — along with Rantanen and Gabriel Landeskog are an unrivaled forward core, comparable to Kane, Jonathan Toews and Patrick Sharp 10 years ago. The Avs supplemented them with offseason additions Andre Burakovsky, Joonas Donskoi and Nazem Kadri, all of whom are having career years.
On defense, Cale Makar is a slam-dunk choice to win the Calder Trophy, overshadowing the fact that fellow 21-year-old Samuel Girard is also blossoming into a top-pair stud. They’re the Duncan Keith-Brent Seabrook equivalent. Veteran Erik Johnson remains a top-quality blue-liner, too — a la Brian Campbell, perhaps.
And the Avalanche will only have more talent flowing in around that stellar core in coming years, as one of the league’s best prospect pools — headlined by 2019 fourth pick Bowen Byram — ages into the NHL.
Byram won’t be around but the rest of Colorado’s star-studded roster (likely by then including Landeskog) will be for two more meetings this month against the Hawks: Dec. 18 in Chicago and Dec. 21 in Denver.
The Hawks had great trouble keeping up with the Avs on the ice this weekend. They’ll presumably have great trouble a few weeks from now, too.
And they’ll most certainly have great trouble keeping up with the Avs in the standings for years to come.
