Brett Kulak. Brett f’n Kulak. The stay-at-home defenseman, who scored one goal all season long. Who’s scored just 29 goals in 12 years in the NHL. Who had such a rough start to his season that he got shipped out by Edmonton, which craves defense like a drowning man craves oxygen. Who got moved again just two months later by Pittsburgh, giving the Avalanche a steady and unspectacular defensive presence on the blue line—the quintessential second-pairing guy you can start and forget about. He won’t make any dumb mistakes, but he won’t surprise you either. You’ll go entire games without announcers mentioning his name. He certainly won’t grab anyone’s attention with his offensive prowess.
When Brett damn Kulak is scoring huge, overtime, series-clinching goals, it’s probably time to start planning the parade:
“You always like to dream about it,” Kulak said, “but the player I am, I’m not the guy everyone’s looking down the bench like, ‘All right, get out there and go win it for us.'”
Kulak’s goal, finishing Marty Necas’s skating work after Minnesota biffed a 2-on-1 the other way, gave Colorado an unlikely 4-3 win in a clinching game in which they looked like toast after 20 minutes. The Avs are never toast. With a 3-0 lead after the first period, the Wild either took their foot off the gas, or the Avs forcibly removed them from the driver’s seat, tied them up, locked them in the trunk, and drove the car over a cliff. Game 5 had more drama than the series as a whole, in which Colorado dispatched a legitimately very good team in the Wild with minimal stress beyond shuffling between their two capable ‘Woods in goal. This 55-win Colorado team is built for a championship, and they’ve provided no reason to think anyone’s going to be able to stop them.
Not even after Mackenzie Blackwood allowed three goals on 13 shots, and ceded the net back to Scott Wedgewood. Those 13 shots at the first intermission would prove a high-water mark; Minnesota would struggle to earn just seven additional shots on goal over the final two periods and overtime. Credit there goes mostly to Colorado’s offense, or even just its reputation—the Wild were so clearly fearful of Avalanche counterattacks that they played tentatively and uncreatively with the puck. “You’re thinking too much, ‘Don’t give them anything,'” said veteran Wild forward Mats Zuccarello. “And you maybe don’t make the plays you need to make against a good team like this. The human brain works sometimes like that. You’re too worried about not letting goals in that you forget about playing the game at times.” Scared hockey is losing hockey.
Parker Kelly, a classic Avs “found on the scrap heap and he’s a 20-goal scorer now” guy, made it 3-1 midway through the second. But the Wild defense was quite stout overall, so that’s where it remained until three and a half minutes left in regulation. Jack Drury put a deflection on a Devon Toews shot that Jesper Wallstedt had no chance at. 3-2.
A couple minutes later, with an extra attacker on, Nathan MacKinnon tied it up from an impossible angle along the goal line.
Defending 5-on-6, someone’s got to go uncovered. The best a team can do is minimize the danger, and 10 times out of 10 they’d take an opponent “settling” for a shot from where MacKinnon took his. “They had a net front, a bumper player, a backside player. We had all those areas covered,” Wild coach John Hynes said, “and MacKinnon made a heck of a shot.”
It wasn’t even the goalie’s fault for giving him a window; you just tip your cap to one of his generation’s greatest scorers finding a lane where one barely existed. “That one hurts a lot,” Wallstedt said. “It felt like I was in good position. It felt like I had the right read.”
Well, all right. MacKinnon beat them. No shame in that; he’s beaten better teams. But when Kulak found the net and the Avs got to celebrate a series win at home for the first time in 18 years, the whole “team of destiny” thing really felt set. Eight wins down, eight to go.
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