The Avalanche peppered New Jersey Devils goaltender Jacob Markstrom with 42 shots on goal, while Scott Wedgewood managed 26 saves on 30 shots at the other end of the ice in the 8-4 win Tuesday night.
A series of mistakes led to four Devils’ goals in four minutes, which was not necessarily a reflection of Wedgewood’s ability.
“He’s going through it the same as the rest of our team. You got to refocus. You got to understand that, hey, you’re in a good spot, you’re making a lot of plays, and you haven’t been perfect defensively,” head coach Jared Bednar said. “His job, at that point for a while there, it looked like he just needed to make one more save than their guy. He just refocused and made some big saves in the third as well. Good veteran presence back there, gets the job done for us.”
It’s not an easy task for a goalie to regroup from that kind of chaos in front of the net, but he did.
“Obviously sucks — we make a couple mistakes, and they make some tic-tac-toe plays and all of a sudden you’ve got four against you, and there’s nothing you can do about it,” Wedgewood said. “Proud of myself to keep my mind in it and go out and just do my job. You can get really frustrated in those situations when they’re just making nice plays and unfortunately, just couldn’t cover them off.”
Importance of Avs’ leadership during crisis time
Amidst that scoring frenzy and quick change of pace, the leadership group guided the team to dial it in and get back on track.
“Just a wake-up call. The first couple of guys were a little bit shocked and stunned, and then we found a way to at least mitigate and somehow come out of that two or one up, whatever we were in the third,” Cale Makar said. “We have a lot of leaders in the room, and a lot of guys chatted in between the period, and everybody came out and played well.”
Olofsson elaborated on some things that were discussed to get everyone back on the rails moving forward.
“Just a few details in the game. We made a couple bad decisions on a few goals there, and invited them back in the game a little bit,” Olofsson said. “Not sit back at all, just go out there and play our game. And I think we did that in the third and came out with a big win for us.”
Effective communication is crucial for a team’s success, and the Avs demonstrated this by earning two points, tying them with the Utah Mammoth for first place in the Western Conference.
