The Colorado Avalanche won their first Stanley Cup since the 2000-01 season and the third Championship in franchise history with a 2-1 victory in Game Six on Sunday over the defending champion Tampa Bay Lightning. Colorado won the series 4-2 and denied the Lightning the opportunity to become the sixth team in NHL history to win three Championships in a row.
Cole Makar was named the Most Valuable Player in the playoffs and was awarded the Conn Smythe Trophy. Makar said the Game Six victory was a team effort, spurred in part by a pre-game speech given by some of the Avalanche’s top veterans.
“We knew the job that we had to do,” said Makar, according to ESPN. “But we needed to just talk about staying mentally locked in and not looking too far ahead. It was Andrew [Cogliano] and Gabriel [Landeskog] and Nathan [MacKinnon]Â speaking and basically just calming the guys down and making sure that regardless of the outcome, just put it all out there and see where the game lies, and that’s kind of where our minds were at.
“I felt like throughout this whole game, our mentality was just win that period and win the next one, get the next shift, and so on, and we were never looking too far ahead to the outcome — and we definitely feel like we earned that one.”
After falling behind 1-0 in the first period, the Avalanche rallied in the second. The first goal came on a one-hit slap shot by MacKinnon that just beat Tampa Bay goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy on the near side.
MacKinnon was a member of the Avalanche during the 2016-17 season that saw the team finish in a dismal last-place spot with little hope of a resurrection.
That season was the first under head coach Jared Bednar and marked a low point for the Avalanche. Bednar previously coached the American Hockey League Lake Erie Monsters to a Calder Cup Championship in 2015-16 and the South Carolina Stingrays to a Kelly Cup Championship in 2008-09. He is the first coach to win championships at all three levels of professional hockey competition.
The go-ahead score came on a deflected pass from MacKinnon that Artturi Lehkonen forced past Vasilevskiy. Both goals by the Avalanche brought controversy as Lightning coaches and players believed penalties should have stopped play.
Just before the first Avalanche score, a delayed penalty call would have given the Lightning possession, but officials ruled that play would continue, a decision that league officials later affirmed. The second goal saw a non-call when a Lightning player was taken to the ice on the opposite end of the rink.
Tampa Bay’s Pat Maroon was so upset by the non-call that he took a swing at Josh Manson’s right ankle with his stick just after the goal. Manson deflected the swing, causing Maroon’s stick to break. Replay showed that the Lightning player who had fallen appeared to grab the stick of the Avalanche player before going to the ice.
Ultimately, aggressive play by the Avalanche kept the Lightning from having many opportunities down the stretch to secure the victory. As the game clock wound down in the third period, the Lightning even pulled their goaltender to add an additional player but proved unable to prevent Colorado from winning their first Stanley Cup in more than 20 years.
