The Avs’ quick resurgence with a glut of young players – after the Joe Sakic\/Milan Hejduk\/Alex Tanguay glory years – has been remarkable. Minnesota hopes its fistful of marquee players and overall team cohesiveness are enough to gloss over potentially substandard goaltending. <\/p>\n
Overall, the Avalanche-Wild series has the makings of an entertaining match-up.<\/p>\n
Western Conference First Round Match-up: Colorado Avalanche vs. Minnesota Wild<\/strong> Fuelled by a Vezina Trophy-caliber season out of goalie Semyon Varlamov and a glut of young talent like captain Gabriel Landeskog, goal scorer Matt Duchene, rookie Nathan MacKinnon and offensive whiz Ryan O’Reilly, Colorado has been a feel-good story in the NHL this year.<\/p>\n The Avs have been among the best teams in the league for the balance of the 2013-14 campaign. They’ll be a tough draw for the Wild, a team that has its own strengths, but raises doubt about the comfort level of their personnel in net.<\/p>\n Minny did its best to shore up those concerns by acquiring Ilya Bryzgalov from Edmonton at the trade deadline. He has silenced critics so far, but there’s only been a small sample size since he’s come over to “The State of Hockey”. The eccentric Russian is 5-1-1 since the trade; he’s shown talent, but unpredictability and volatility in his playoff career’s body of work.<\/p>\n If “Bryz” is on his game, Minnesota will be considerably more challenging an opponent. The Wild blueline is in good shape with Ryan Suter and Jonas Brodin, while the scoring is A-OK thanks to Matt Moulson, Zach Parise and Mikael Granlund. However, Minnesota and all other Western Conference foes should take notice: Disregard the Avalanche at your peril. Much like a cheeky Rockies ski trip in late spring, the Avalanche can bury you with their strength.<\/p>\n Colorado is a youthful, energetic and skilful club; one that head coach Patrick Roy has helped along by pushing fellow goalie Varlamov to maximize his potential. What’s Varlamov done? Simply beaten Hall of Famer Roy’s franchise record for wins (41 to Patty’s 40).<\/p>\n The Avs will miss Duchene until likely late in the first round, but there’s still plenty of firepower to go around. There was often worries about Colorado’s defensive capability, but this year it’s upgraded from one of the league’s worst units to middle of the pack. With so many scorers and sharp netminding, that’s good enough.<\/p>\n This series should go deep if Bryzgalov can play as well as (recently) advertised. Colorado is more prolific with the lamp-lighting, but the Wild roll out a balanced hockey club. Minnesota has the kind of gritty, high-character players that wear you down over six or seven games.<\/p>\n Minnesota’s new goaltender is undeniably talented, but some of his previous lapses in play have defied explanation and they should provide a bit of worry eating away at the Wild fan’s subconscious.<\/p>\n If the Colorado attack rattles Bryz with a flurry of goals, the Avs could quickly gain a stranglehold. Having said that, if Ilya keeps his recent performance up, Minnesota has a good chance of pulling the upset in six or seven games.<\/p>\n I bet that Bryzgalov will have some sort of implosion and the O’Reillys, MacKinnons and Landeskogs of the world will capitalize like they’ve done all season long.<\/p>\n Prediction: Colorado in six<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Betting Stanley Cup P layoffs? The Avs’ quick resurgence with a glut of young players – after the Joe Sakic\/Milan Hejduk\/Alex Tanguay glory years – has been remarkable. Minnesota hopes its fistful of marquee players and overall team cohesiveness are enough to gloss over potentially substandard goaltending.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":68919,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[61877,35356,61879,61878,2287,12777,11729,18113],"class_list":["post-75473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nhl","tag-avalanche-vs-wild","tag-colorado-avalanche","tag-colorado-avalanche-vs-minnesota-wild","tag-colorado-vs-minnesota","tag-minnesota-wild","tag-nhl-playoff-odds","tag-round-1","tag-series-odds"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/capperspicks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/capperspicks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/capperspicks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capperspicks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/127"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capperspicks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75473"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/capperspicks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75648,"href":"https:\/\/capperspicks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75473\/revisions\/75648"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capperspicks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/capperspicks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capperspicks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capperspicks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nDate\/Time: Series starts Thursday, April 17 2014 at Colorado (Pepsi Center, Denver CO)<\/strong>
\nColorado is a -145 money line favorite in this series<\/strong>
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\nThe swing-for-the-fences move of acquiring Suter and Parise a couple of seasons ago makes sense if the supporting cast around them is adequate enough to make an impact in hockey’s Second Season.<\/p>\n