After a crazy finish in Philadelphia the night before, in which the Colorado Avalanche defeated the Flyers 5-4 in a shootout, the Avs fell apart in New York on Sunday night in a 6-4 beat-down that wasn’t as close as the score made it look.
Perhaps it was the loss of both Blake Comeau and Matt Duchene at the same moment mid-game — Comeau to injury and Duchene in a trade to the Senators — or maybe the Islanders simply out-hustled the Avs. Either way, the game was not pretty for Colorado.
In just his fifth game in goal this season — and in an Avalanche uniform — Jonathan Bernier struggled to get the job done, but his defense ahead of him didn’t do much to help stop the scoring, either. He weathered 28 shots over the three periods, many of them high-quality.
The Islanders got off to a quick start when Scott Mayfield snuck the puck past Bernier just four minutes in to gain the early advantage. His efforts were aided and abetted by Jordan Eberle just nine minutes later, putting New York up 2-0 at the end of the first period.
At the start of the second, just 40 seconds in, Colorado’s Nathan MacKinnon made things interesting when he bested New York’s Thomas Greiss, drawing the score to 2-1. That didn’t last long. Just 55 seconds later, the Islanders’ Nick Leddy scored on a power play, only 10 seconds after Carl Soderberg was put in the penalty box for hooking Eberle. After that, the Islanders completely blew the game open with three additional scores from Leddy, Johnny Boychuk and Eberle. Gabriel Landeskog eased the deficit ever so slightly with a goal of his own.
In the final 30 seconds of play, Alex Kerfoot cranked up the intensity by confounding the Islander defense, scoring two goals to try to make things more interesting. But it was too little, too late as the Avs fell, 6-4.
With the loss, the Avs drop to 8-6-0 on the season, and will head to Sweden to play Ottawa — and Matt Duchene — in a pair of games starting next Friday.