In the spirit of over-analyzing preseason performances, here are three takeaways from “Team White’s” 3-1 win over Team Burgundy during the Colorado Avalanche’s intra-squad scrimmage on Sunday at Magness Arena.
No. 3 — Possible forward combos revealed?
The combination of Mikhail Grigorenko, Nathan MacKinnon and Alex Tanguay produced the White Team’s first goal of the evening when Tanguay cashed in a nice pass from MacKinnon. Tanguay was content but said the group “could’ve easily had two or three more goals.” The line has played together every day of training camp.
There’s a little less evidence to suggest that the line of Carl Soderberg, Landeskog and 18-year-old Mikko Rantanen is here to stay. The three practiced together as a line for the first time on Friday. But the chemistry was evident early on, and the team’s first round pick in Rantanen scored the White Team’s second goal of the game.
No. 2 — Solid camp so far
We’ve already touched on it, but once again, the Avs are healthy and deep for the first time in a long time. Roy noted that there seems to be a greater sense of urgency in a training camp that has been “a lot better” — even better than Roy’s first year in Colorado, when the Avs won 52 games and sat atop the Central Division.
There’s reason to be excited, and that’s echoed by Avs radio voice Marc Moser.
You can see depth in the Avs org. growing all the time…diff. decisions on players are ones that org's love to have..means overall health
— Marc Moser TV (@RadioMoser) September 21, 2015
No. 1 — Taken with a grain of salt
Head Coach Patrick Roy, like the veteran Alex Tanguay and Captain Gabriel Landeskog, was happy with performances from Sunday. At the same time, all of them added the “it’s still preseason” qualifier to their post-game comments. Roy alluded to differences in preseason play in his post-game presser:
“There’s a lot of things that I liked obviously. I’m curious to see a real game. Today, it was more like show the skills then with the physicality in the games and stuff like this. I’m curious to see Tuesday night against Anaheim.”
The next installment of preseason takes place tomorrow at the Pepsi Center against the Anaheim Ducks in the teams’ first preseason contest.
Calvin Jouard is a Mile High Sports intern and University of Denver student