SportsPulse: The Vegas Golden Knights are rewriting the history books on what it means to be an expansion team and in the process captivating a city. Our NHL insider Kevin Allen believes their magical run could end with a Stanley Cup. USA TODAY Sports
DENVER – Nashville, your professional hockey team might be all right after all.
Denver, yours has a future and deserved the ovation it got Sunday at Pepsi Center after a postseason that wasn’t supposed to happen went longer than anyone not affiliated with the Colorado Avalanche would have guessed.
Winnipeg, you said you wanted Nashville, and Nashville you shall get.
Maybe this will hurt the Nashville Predators in that pending, monster series against the Winnipeg Jets, and maybe it will help. Extra work and travel on one hand, affirmation of this team’s resolve on the other. We’ll find out in the next couple of weeks.
But on Sunday the Predators earned the right to enjoy for a few moments a 5-0 throttling of the Avalanche to take the first-round series 4 games to 2, because every series victory in the Stanley Cup playoffs is something.
The Preds mobbed Pekka Rinne after he and his defense made sure a quick 4-0 lead stayed safe, and then they shook hands with the upstart Avalanche after the nastiest night yet between the teams. And now, before digging in on a second-round series between the teams with the two best records in the NHL this season, which will start sometime this week at Bridgestone Arena, they deserve a slice of satisfaction.
This series would have ended just as hockey punditry expected had the Predators held on to a 1-0 lead in the waning moments of Friday’s Game 5 at party-ready Bridgestone Arena. Instead, the Avalanche scored twice in the final 4:11 to kill the party music – you could almost hear the “scree-e-e-e-e-ech!” on the turntable – and send this series back to Denver. This was adversity in the life of a Presidents’ Trophy winner and the favorite to win it all, a foreign life for this team and franchise.
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On Sunday the Predators handled it. They handled the quick turnaround after Friday’s stunning reversal. They handled the rowdy thousands assembled to help them lose, and they handled the Avalanche by every measure. They played the kind of hockey that can keep them advancing.
They got a blast from Mattias Ekholm for the first goal of the game and first for a Nashville defenseman in this series. They got more excellence from the third line of Austin Watson, Nick Bonino and Colton Sissons – it finished with a team-high 19 points in six games while shadowing superstar Nathan MacKinnon and his top line – and Watson popped in a Sissons miss for his fourth goal of a series in which he was Nashville’s unofficial MVP.
The Predators blocked shots and delivered hits. They stayed out of the box and overcame weird calls. Arvidsson’s early blast of MacKinnon set a tone. He recovered from a Sven Andrighetto cross check to the throat (Arvidsson also was called for embellishment, apparently for making his throat cave in too dramatically) to make it 5-0 on a third-period breakaway.
Third-string goalie Andrew “Hamburglar” Hammond stole Game 5. The Predators peppered him with shots, coming with all the sauce they could muster in the second and third periods, but he relished the grilling and owned the moment. His performance was exactly as good as the burger puns in this paragraph are bad. On Sunday the Preds made Hammond human again, and a couple of shots they got past him – from Bonino and Filip Forsberg – surely made him grimace.
Rinne, meanwhile, stood tall on the Avs’ rare penetrations of his defense for his fourth playoff shutout. He’s had ups and downs in the postseason just like his team. Because it’s, you know, the postseason. The Stanley Cup champion Penguins squandered their own Game 5 clinching opportunity at home Friday against Philadelphia – the Pens then came back to win Game 6 Sunday – and the Boston Bruins did the same in the same situation Saturday against Toronto. It happens.
Survive, advance, enjoy briefly, look forward. Jets fans chanted “We want Nashville!” on Friday night after their team crushed the Minnesota Wild to end that series in five games, and now Preds fans can reciprocate. Maybe first they’d like to send a parting shot to the supporters of that pesky team in Denver, who spent most of Sunday sighing?
Nah. What’s the point in being cheesy? Nashville has bigger burgers to bag.
