Cale Makar on Saturday night barely broke a smile after scoring his second goal and the Colorado Avalanche’s seventh of the night. He fist-bumped Mikko Rantanen to thank him for the pass and skated to the bench.
He and the Avalanche are calm, confident and rolling. They are now two wins from dethroning the two-time defending champions.
Looking like by far the better team, the Avalanche overwhelmed the Tampa Bay Lightning 7-0 in Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final to take a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven series.
Photo: AP
Coach Jared Bednar called it “as close to perfect of a game as you can get from your players.”
“I feel like we played to our identity to a ‘T’ tonight,” Makar said. “We had some good goals and stuff like that... It was a little bit of a weird one tonight.”
Valeri Nichushkin scored his seventh and eighth goals of the playoffs and continued to be the best player on the ice in the final, Game 1 overtime hero Andre Burakovsky beat Andrei Vasilevskiy again and even defenseman Josh Manson and 35-year-old grinder Darren Helm got in on the fun with a goal apiece.
Makar, who did not even have a shot on goal in Game 1, scored twice in the third period, inciting chants of “We want the Cup” from a fired up crowd.
“They’re playing at an elite level right now — give them credit. We are not,” Lightning coach Jon Cooper said. “They’re two good teams. They’re just playing a much higher level right now than we are.”
Rarely have the Lightning been completely outclassed during this run of post-season success, but they also had not faced an opponent like the Avalanche, who forced them into one uncharacteristic mistake after another.
Colorado was dominant in every facet of the game to move two victories away from its first title since 2001, and the first by this core led by Nathan MacKinnon.
The Avalanche go to Tampa Bay, Florida, for Game 3 tonight as just the third team in NHL history to score three-plus goals in the first period of Games 1 and 2 in a final.
The dominant performance started by pouncing on an early mistake by typically reliable Lightning defenseman Erik Cernak, when he bobbled the puck at the blue line on one of the game’s first shifts.
It was all Avalanche after that.
Their aggressive forecheck led them to draw a penalty on veteran Ryan McDonagh, score on the ensuing power play when Burakovsky fed Nichushkin for his first of the night. It was not his last, and Colorado poured it on with six of the game’s first seven shots and complete territorial domination with much of the game played in the Tampa Bay end.
With Vasilevskiy — whose play was the key to the Lightning’s incredible ability to bounce back after a loss in the playoffs — looking shaky and even dropping his head after letting Makar beat him clean on one of many two-on-one rushes, the Avalanche made the most of all their offensive zone time.
The highest-scoring team this postseason put on a clinic against the team that has played more hockey than anyone else over the past two years.
The way the Lightning lost this one — by far their biggest blowout loss during this run — came as a surprise to just about everyone.
“Am I shocked that we lost 7-zip?” Lightning captain Steven Stamkos said. “I mean, I don’t think we saw that coming.”
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