Corpus Christi Caller Times Caller.com - Avalanche makes early statement with Game 1 domination of Stars

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Monday, May 15, 2000

Avalanche makes early statement with Game 1 domination of Stars
Colorado has the look of team intent on returning Cup to Denver
By Bob Kravitz
Scripps Howard News Service
DALLAS - This wasn't a matter of stealing a hockey game. This wasn't a reprise of Game 4 in Detroit, when the Avalanche won an overtime game it had no right winning. There were no fingerprints on this one, no evidence for the jury to consider.
   What Colorado did was take Game 1 - beating the Dallas Stars 2-0 and seizing the early lead in the Western Conference finals Saturday night like a team intent on maintaining it. Game 2 is Monday night.
   The Avs came to town and grabbed this sucker around the neck. They came to Reunion Arena and out-mucked and out-ground the best mucking, grinding team in the game. They came here and made a loud and resounding statement, pounding the Stars with hyper-physicality and then scoring with speed and special teams.
   "Does this team's focus and intensity remind you of the (1995-96) Cup year?" someone asked Patrick Roy - who, by the way, remains as good, if not better, than Ed Belfour.
   Roy could barely contain his giddiness. He knows what a special team looks like, and he sees something that is beginning to resemble a special team.
   "Pretty much," he said with a smile. "It's fun to see how the guys are right now."
   You know what the Colorado Avalanche has become? It's become the Dallas Stars with slightly more flair. Pierre Lacroix always said he would not let his high-flying, entertaining team become the drab-but-successful Stars, but that's what has happened, and that's what had to happen for Colorado to make a claim on the Stanley Cup. Nobody wins championships anymore playing 7-5 games.
   They play the way the Avs played Saturday night, the way the Stars played all of last season. Get a lead, go to the hockey four corners and hatch that advantage. The only trouble came with some of Roy's early stick-handling misadventures - he keeps it interesting, doesn't he? - and in the third period when the Avalanche played too cautiously.
   Beyond that, though, it was perfect Dallas Stars, um, Colorado Avalanche hockey.
   "Any time somebody wins a championship in our league, people will look at that team to see how they did it," said Avs forward Dave Reid, who owns a ring from his Dallas Cup-winning team. "Really, it goes all the way back to the old Montreal Canadiens, when they were winning all those championships.
   "Then (former Canadiens great) Jacques Lemaire brings that style to New Jersey and they win. (Former Canadiens star) Bob Gainey is (the general manager) here in Dallas. You've got Scotty Bowman taking the old Montreal defensive system to Detroit ... When people say we're looking more like Dallas, I look at that as a compliment."
   Even the hockey-challenged - I'm not naming names -could make out Colorado's essential game plan: Beat Dallas' defensemen with their own forwards' speed.
   Beat the heck out of anything that moved, especially Mike Modano, who spent half the night searching the arena for lost body parts. Shoot, even Sandis "The Latvian Menace" Ozolinsh ran Modano down like a dog. The Avalanche did to Modano what Richard Matvichuk and his ilk did last season to Peter Forsberg and Joe Sakic. This is called taking the initiative.
   Take gratuitous potshots at Belfour, who has a history of coming unhinged when opponents invade his space.
   And it worked. It worked to grisly perfection. The Avalanche won a third consecutive game without Ray Bourque -and yes, Bourque should take the precaution of waiting until Game 3 to return - by playing the kind of hockey it's been playing for more than a month now. Smart, nasty, I-want-this-more-than-you-do hockey.
   By late in the game, you could see Modano on the perimeter of a scrum in front of Roy's net, the puck loose, but Modano refusing to stick his nose in the fray. He looked like a player who had been beaten on all night, including one sequence when Adam Foote, who was great again, deposited the fleet Modano into the Avalanche bench, where he was not offered a cold beverage.
   The Avs won here by showing the Dallas Stars how Dallas Stars hockey is played. This is what Bowman meant when he suggested the Avalanche was better suited for this conference final this time around. These are not the soft and fancy Avs anymore. Now, they dump. And chase. And hit. And win.
   This was a mission statement. The pretty-as-a-picture Avs don't live here anymore. It wasn't just Modano and Joe Nieuwendyk and Brett Hull. Did you see the hit Adam Deadmarsh dropped on Richard Matvichuk? That play freed Peter Forsberg to do the kinds of things only Forsberg can do, leading to Aaron Miller's goal.
   "We won the first game (last year) and lost the second one," Milan Hejduk said. "But I think this year will be totally different."
   Kind of get that feeling, don't you?

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