As Colorado Avalanche go bust, players hoping for better hands

NEW YORK – Matt Duchene pictures last season for the Colorado Avalanche like they were all sitting at a blackjack table.

The NHL’s other 29 teams were dealing; the Avs were getting the cards; and no matter how they played the hand they were dealt, the chips were pushed over to them at the end of the hand, winning confidently.

“When you get on the right side of it, you feel like you can’t lose. You’re doubling down on it every time. Doing things you shouldn’t be doing. But you’re making money.

“And then,” Duchene snaps his fingers, “it turns.”

At this point last season, the Avalanche were 14-3-0. They had a goal differential of plus-25. Entering Thursday night’s game against the New York Rangers … well, it’s turned, that’s for sure: 4-8-5, a minus-16 goal differential.

“[You feel like] you can’t win,” said Duchene, extending the analogy. “You’re getting 20. They’re getting 21.”

The Avalanche have dug a hole from which they can’t seem to dig. Their confidence is shot. Their offense – which along with goalie Semyon Varlamov powered this team to the top of the division – is sputtering.

“It’s tough to put our finger exactly on it. When one part of our game gets going, another part of our game that was going are falling apart. It’s been a battle,” said Danny Briere, who’s only experienced the downturn, having played in Montreal last season.

As Duchene said, when it’s going well, you get away with stuff. Their corsi (5 on 5, close games) was 47.4 last season, 25th in the NHL. It’s 42.6 percent so far this season, ahead of only that corpse dressed up as the Buffalo Sabres.

The Avalanche had a PDO of 102.2 last season (5 on 5, in close games), a metric that adds shooting percentage with save percentage in an effort to, for lack of a better term, quantify luck. This season it’s 99.4, which can be read several ways; one of them is that they’re not getting the same bounces, which is something coach Patrick Roy has lamented recently.

Not as if the numbers matter to Duchene at this point. “I’m not looking at any stats. Any standings. We just had to put our heads down and work hard,” he said.

Well, there’s one stat that has his attention: 2.29, the Avs’ goals per game through 17 games. Last season they were fourth in the NHL at 2.99 goals per game.

“We’re not generating the chances we were last year,” he said. We just made plays last year, and we believed every time we tried to connect on a play that we did. This year, if you take that split second too long to think about it, it’s gone. Then you try and you turn the puck over.”

Duchene has 10 points this season, leading the team along with center Nathan MacKinnon. That’s down from last year’s points-per-game for both, and par for the course for the Avs’ offense.

The immediate reaction to this scoring swoon is, of course, who isn’t there anymore: Center Paul Stastny, who signed a big money free-agent deal with division rival St. Louis, taking his 60 points with him.

“We miss him. Obviously. He’s one of my best buddies, and I’ll never say we don’t miss him. It’s just not true. Any team would miss him,” said Duchene. “But we’ve added other pieces that counterbalance that, and we’re not thinking about it.”

But the pieces aren’t fitting quite yet. Jarome Iginla, a 30-goal first-liner for the Boston Bruins last season, has two goals in 17 games. Briere’s been in and out of the lineup. The rest of the team, and specifically captain Gabe Landeskog (six points in 17 games, minus-10), hasn’t picked up the slack.

Some of this is surprising – well, not to the hockey punditry that predicted a crash back tot Earth for this team – but if there’s anything the Avalanche haven’t been this season is a surprise. They admit, to a man, that they caught the NHL off-guard last year, like someone who doesn’t look the part sitting down and drawing aces at the gaming table.

“Last year we surprised a lot of people. That’s certainly not the case this year. We knew no teams would take us lightly, and they haven’t,” said Landeskog.

MacKinnon said those anticipations weigh heavier in this year’s defeats vs. last year’s.

“We had some expectations on us this season vs. last season,” said MacKinnon. “And because of those expectations, losing always seems a little hard to take, because we’re expected to win.”

Briere still expects them to win. “You look around the room and you see the potential. In what this team accomplished last year. We know the potential is there,” he said.

And he said he knows Patrick Roy expects them to win as well.

“Patrick has been very, very positive through it all. But he’s making us accountable,” said Briere. “The last couple of days haven’t been fun.”

Roy hasn’t erupted yet in public, not even after the 6-0 curb-stomping the New York Islanders put on the Avs. He’s been collected. He’s been optimistic. He’s been what Duchene said the team needs, at least in front of the cameras.

“As soon as the coach presses the panic button, then everyone panics. They start gripping the stick, not making plays,” he said. “We need to get back to believing we’re going to make the play.

Or, as they say at the blackjack table …

“Believing we’re going to make a 21 out of 16,” said Duchene.