How the Avalanche season came to a stunning end at the hands of the Dallas Stars

DALLAS — Everything was set up for the Colorado Avalanche to finally slay some demons and take down the Dallas Stars in a playoff series for the first time in nearly two decades.

Mikko Rantanen and the undermanned Stars had other ideas.

Like most everyone in Colorado, I've been trying to figure out how the heck the Avalanche failed to best the Stars in this series since Game 7 ended Saturday night. This should have been the year. And yet, it wasn't.

Dallas played the entire series without its best player in Miro Heiskanen and its leading goal scorer in Jason Robertson. The Avalanche got their captain back in Game 3 and guess what? Gabriel Landeskog is still really good. Nathan MacKinnon scored six goals in the series. Everything aligned for Colorado to move on to the second round.

And yet, they're the team starting their summer early and not the Stars. It's a tough pill to swallow but it's reality. How did we get here? I have a few thoughts. Five, to be exact:

 
Disastrous special teams

Say what you want about the wildly inconsistent officiating we've seen from the NHL since the playoffs started, but the fact is one team took advantage of their opportunities while the other didn't. 

All the focus is on Colorado's power play, but let's start with the penalty kill. When Dallas found a way to get set up in the zone, it felt like the Avalanche were holding on for dear life. The Stars were able to whip around the puck and hit the seam pass whenever they wanted, something Colorado's power play couldn't do. A couple of gargantuan efforts from Logan O'Connor while shorthanded only saved this unit a little bit.

Now, about that Colorado power play. It was ugly — real ugly — for most of the series. The Avalanche had the top power play in the NHL from the moment Mikko Rantanen was traded until the moment the regular season ended. A big reason why was actual player movement instead of the same stagnant players we had seen for the first four months of the season. That movement disappeared against the Stars and the top unit became very easy to defend.

The personnel choices were interesting. Valeri Nichushkin didn't have a great series but he's at his best in front of the net on the power play. They went away from that pretty quickly. Jonathan Drouin is no threat to shoot so the Stars didn't even concern themselves with defending that possibility. Putting Gabriel Landeskog in Drouin's spot, another guy who is at his best in front of the net, was another interesting decision.

Ultimately, this series was lost because of Colorado's power play being unable to take advantage in key situations. The Avs had a power play with under 2 minutes remaining in regulation during Game 2 and couldn't capitalize. They lost. They had a 4-minute power play that bled over into overtime in Game 3 and didn't score. They lost. And they had a fruitless power play with a 2-1 lead late in the third of Game 7. Once again, they lost.

Meanwhile, Dallas got a power play with 4 minutes left in Game 7 and with the game tied. They needed less than 20 seconds to capitalize. Special teams were the difference in a series where the Avalanche looked like the better team at 5-on-5. For the folks looking for potential coaching changes, this is probably their best argument for some.

Third-period collapses

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Is collapse the right word to use? Maybe, maybe not. Dallas is a very good team and has a say in things, but the Avalanche had not one, not two, but three blown leads in the third period of this series. They lost all three of those games. Close out one of those games, which is a very reasonable ask, and the Avs are moving on.

For as good as Colorado was in the first 45 minutes of Game 7 (and it was good), it doesn't matter right now because they couldn't finish the job. Is that on the players or the coaching staff? Probably a little bit of both.

Inconsistent secondary scoring

MacKinnon wasn't perfect in this series, but a six-goal, 11-point performance in round one probably should have been enough. It wasn't.

Nothing against O'Connor, who was probably Colorado's most consistent forward throughout the series, but he was their second-leading scorer in the series. That's great for him but a sure sign that some key forwards underperformed in this series.

Landeskog was not one of them. The fact that he came back and looked as good as he did is a miracle. His linemates left a bit to be desired, though. Nichushkin struggled during every road game of the series and finished with just three points. While Brock Nelson looked better once Landeskog was put on that line, he still finished the series with zero goals and four assists.

The third line was a non-factor offensively. Drouin, Charlie Coyle, and Joel Kiviranta combined for one even strength point in the series. Drouin played under 8 minutes in Game 7, and you have to wonder if he fell out of favor with the coaching staff. He's set to become an unrestricted free agent this summer. So is Kiviranta, who went cold after setting a career high in goals during the regular season.

The middle-six up front could look very different when the next season begins.

Goaltending difference

Mackenzie Blackwood was great for the first four games of the series. Jake Oettinger was fantastic the entire series. How much of that is experience? That's difficult to say but it's difficult to deny that the Stars got better goaltending from start to finish.

And then there's Cale Makar

No one holds themselves to a higher standard than Makar, who was clearly distraught in the locker room after Game 7. There was also some bad luck on his end, although no one really cares about that right now.

He put 25 shots towards Oettinger in this series, the second most of any Avalanche player. Quite a few of them were grade-A chances too. None of them went in, though. It's not like he forgot to score after becoming the first NHL defenseman in over a decade to pot 30 in the regular season. Sometimes a goalie has your number, and you catch a cold streak. It's just terrible timing for the Avalanche that happened in this series. He certainly could have been better, but the Stars and Oettinger deserve some credit for how they played against him.

For all these reasons as well as a few others, it will be a very long summer for the Avalanche.