Game 1 Preview: The most wonderful time of the year

Alright, let’s do this thing for real.

After finishing up the 82-game NHL regular season earlier in the week, the Colorado Avalanche begin their quest for the Stanley Cup tonight as they take on the Dallas Stars in a first-round matchup. These two teams met three times in the regular season, with Colorado winning two of those games and Dallas winning one including that crazy last meeting that finished in overtime.

Colorado Avalanche

After a very long 82-game season, it’s finally time for the Avs to do this for real and play for the Stanley Cup. They’ll face an all-too familiar opponent in the first round, as they take on the Dallas Stars. This current version of the Colorado Avalanche looks as equipped as ever to go on a deep run this year. And there’s another player adding to that depth by being an option for this Avs team, and that player is, of course, Gabe Landeskog.

Landeskog of course did a conditioning stint with the Colorado Eagles in the AHL earlier this month, and he will be an option for all of the first round of the playoffs, making this current team that much deeper than they already are.

Projected Lineup

Artturi Lehkonen – Nathan MacKinnon – Martin Necas
Jonathan Drouin – Brock Nelson – Valeri Nichushkin
Joel Kiviranta – Charlie Coyle – Ross Colton
Parker Kelly – Jack Drury – Logan O’Connor

Devon Toews – Cale Makar
Samuel Girard – Josh Manson
Erik Johnson – Ryan Lindgren

Dallas Stars

While Colorado has gotten healthy, and has the potential to get even healthier and deeper with the potential return of Landeskog, Dallas has unfortunately gone in the opposite direction toward the end of the season. Not only have they lost seven straight games, but they’ve also suffered some key injuries throughout the season, and to end the year.

On top of missing Miro Heiskanen, the Stars will also be starting this series without Jason Robertson, as he suffered an injury in Dallas’ last game of the season against the Nashville Predators. Heiskanen has been upgraded to day-to-day, apparently now, though. Despite those injuries, this Stars team is not one to take lightly at all, they’re still going to make life hard for Colorado, and they’re still a very deep team.

Projected Lineup

Mikael Granlund – Roope Hintz – Evgenii Dadonov
Mason marchment – Matt Duchene – Tyler Seguin
Jamie Benn – Wyatt Johnston – Mikko Rantanen
Oskar Back – Sam Steel – Mavrik Bourque

Esa Lindell – Cody Ceci
Thomas Harley – Ilya Lyubushkin
Lian Bichsel – Alex Petrovic

Goaltenders

For tonight’s game, and likely the larger part of the series, it’ll be Mackenzie Blackwood and Jake Oettinger in net for Colorado and Dallas respectively. It’ll be really interesting to see how Blackwood plays in this series, as he’s never played playoff hockey before. Of course you need him to be good, but that’s kind of all you need him to be. Colorado’s good enough and deep enough this year where they just need a goalie to be good enough, in my opinon anyway. Oettinger on the other hand has a very well-established playoffs track record and experience. You can’t make life easy on Oettinger, and need to make life difficult on him in order to beat him.