Turn out the lights.
The Boldy’s over.
The Wild are Temu tough guys. Paper tigers. The only Stanley Cup that Minnesota will be lifting this summer costs $10.85 on Amazon.com before shipping, and you’ve got to blow it up yourself.
The Avalanche have blown up the Wild plenty already.
“We need to have our confidence, you can’t waver (on) that,” Colorado defenseman Cale Makar said after the Avs won 5-2 to take a 2-0 lead in their best-of-seven Stanley Cup Series. “The next game is the hardest.”
Minnesota’s desperate now. And with good reason. With 14:06 left in a 3-1 game and the Wild on the power play, Ryan Hartman put Makar in a chokehold. Avalanche plugger Parker Kelly closed in and swung at everything within reach — including the linesman. Minnesota star Matt Boldy put the cherry on top by flopping like a Portuguese striker at the World Cup. No call.
The Wild pushed the Stars around in the first round. They thought they could do the same to the Avs. They thought wrong.
The Wild’s forwards thought they could skate with Colorado at altitude. Wrong again.
The Wild’s defenders thought Nathan MacKinnon wouldn’t hit back. So, so, sooooo wrong.
“They’re a big, physical team. Yep, I get it,” Avalanche coach Jared Bednar said. “But we’re not small.”
In the history of Lord Stanley, a team with a 2-0 lead in a best-of-seven eventually wins the thing 86.2% of the time. When they go up 2-0 starting at home, that number jumps up to 88.3%.
Of course, the ’20-21 Avs were among that 12%. What happens in Vegas stays in MacKinnon’s soul. The Dogg still wears that scar.
Those Avs were Presidents’ Trophy winners, too. They led the blankety-blank Golden Knights 2-0 in the second round. They lost four straight. Somehow.
Center Nicolas Roy (10) of the Colorado Avalanche celebrates his goal on goaltender Filip Gustavsson (32) of the Minnesota Wild with teammate center Ross Colton (20) during the second period of Game 2 of the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs on Tuesday, May 5, 2026, at Ball Arena in Denver. (Photo by Timothy Hurst/The Denver Post)
Colorado forward Nicolas Roy was on the ’21 Vegas team that did the deed. Only those Avs, the ones from five years earlier, didn’t have a big guy like him to win scrums, screen goalies, plow defensemen and blot out the sun.
Those Avs didn’t have Scott Wedgewood, a man with the spider sense to keep his team one goal ahead — whether that’s 3-2, 7-6 or 1-0. Wedgie, who took a 2.15 postseason Goals Against Average into Tuesday night, also been better than the Philipp Grubauer of 2020-21 (2.61 postseason GAA). And the Darcy Kuemper, bless him, of 2021-22 (2.57 GAA).
They didn’t have Brock Nelson and Val Nichushkin, who stand 13 feet tall when laid end-to-end, on a second line that can lean on defenders and work the boards.
They didn’t have Brent Burns stalking the corners the way Leatherface did with a chainsaw.
They didn’t have the No. 1 penalty-killing unit on Planet Earth (83.1% during the regular season in ’20-21, ranked eighth; 84.6% in ’25-26, the NHL’s best).
“(There are) a lot of similarities, obviously (to that ’21 team), a lot of lineup changes,” Roy reflected. “But I remember playing in this building — it was always buzzing when the team goes going.”
Do you see Minnesota winning in Ball Arena when it’s buzzing like this? And when the Avs are playing like this?
When Roy found the back of the net 84 seconds into the middle period, the Avs tied a Stanley Cup Playoffs record with 11 different scorers over the first two games of a series. They’d go on to set a new one, with 12.
Context: The Avs saw 16 different guys score over 20 games of their entire ’21-22 Cup run.
If you can’t meet the moment, you at least have to meet the urgency. Colorado did both.
The Avs opened Game 1 with a lead for a period and a half on Sunday night. They started Game 2 with one for about six seconds.
Barely three minutes into the first period, MacKinnon led a rush over the Minnesota blue line, drew a defender into the corner, and dumped a no-look dish to a rocketing Martin Necas at the right face-off dot. The Czech forward deked once, then flipped a backhand past a screening Artturi Lehkonen and high over goalie Filip Gustavsson’s right shoulder for a 1-0 Colorado lead.
Alan Roach was still screaming Necas’ name over the Ball public-address system when the Avs gave one right back. Minnesota won the faceoff, and the Wild’s Kirill Kaprizov split Necas and Makar with the puck at the Colorado blue line. The Russian winger zipped into the crease untouched, slinging the breakaway biscuit past Wedgewood to tie the tilt and stun the still-stomping faithful.
If the Wild’s Achilles toe is its goaltending tandem, its Achilles heel is a penalty kill unit that ranks dead-last among second-round NHL teams in kill rate (59.3%) and power-play goals allowed (11).
The Avs took advantage roughly 12 minutes into the opening period with a crisp, quick power-play sequence that turned the clock back to the ’22 Cup champs. Like a balletic 6-4-3 double play, Colorado pulled off a near-note-perfect 8-88-29-92 wrister, a sequence that started with Makar on the blue line and ended with MacKinnon feeding an open Landeskog in the crease for a nifty wrister and a 2-1 Avs cushion.
In hindsight, we should’ve seen a defensive correction coming. Makar promised that things would tighten up after the opener, a Game 1 that saw the most combined goals in an Avs postseason tussle (15) since Game 1 of the ’22 Western Conference Finals vs. Edmonton (14). Bednar likes to preach defense, even if his blue-liners haven’t always practiced it.
Colorado only gave up five goals or more only 10 times during the regular season. In the next game, the Avs allowed an average of 1.8 goals. Before Sunday, Colorado, since 2021, had been in nine playoff contests in which they’d surrendered five or more, but none of which ended their season. They had a 7-2 record in the game that immediately followed, giving up 2.5 goals on average with one shutout.
Gustavsson was an interesting choice, although hardly an inspired one. The Swede was 3-7-1 lifetime with a 3.56 GAA in 11 regular-season starts vs. the Avs, with a 2-2 mark and a 2.96 GAA over his last four tussles against the burgundy and blue.
Desperate times. Desperate measures.
“Obviously the (Avalanche’s) speed, the (offense) can move the puck quick,” Roy continued. Then he smiled. Mischievously. “It was a lot of same (in 2021). So it’s good to be on this side now.”
