They had 38 shots on goal, but the Nashville Predators were unable to score, and they fell to the Colorado Avalanche, 5-0, on Saturday evening at Bridgestone Arena. The result stops Nashville’s win streak at two and sees the Preds and Avs split their four-game season series.
In addition to the shot tally, Colorado blocked 19 additional Nashville attempts in the contest, with the Preds left looking to make sense of a game where the score didn’t necessarily reflect the overall effort.
“I didn’t think it was 5-0 game at all; I actually thought we played pretty well,” Preds Captain Roman Josi said. “It felt like we had a lot of chances, and they just capitalized on all of their chances.”
“I don’t have a problem with the way we worked today; I have a problem with the result,” Predators Head Coach Peter Laviolette said. “When you go back at it, there are some things that happened defensively where we tried to be better. At the end of the day, they capitalized on the chances they got.”
Colorado had a 1-0 lead after one period of play thanks to a strike from Nathan MacKinnon roughly three minutes into the contest. The visitors got two more in the second period, first on a power-play goal from Alexander Kerfoot, and that was followed by Gabriel Landeskog with less than two minutes to play in the middle stanza.
The Avalanche added two more in the third before the final horn sounded with Pekka Rinne taking the loss in net, while Philipp Grubauer earned the shutout for Colorado.
“We did some good things, and the bottom line is that Colorado’s goalie stood on his head,” Preds center Ryan Johansen said. “They had some guys make some plays, and our guys didn’t make enough plays.”
The Predators will have the day off on Sunday before returning to the rink on Monday to host the Edmonton Oilers in the final outing of a three-game homestand, and they’ll look to erase Saturday’s contest from the memory banks before heading back out on the road.
“It’s definitely a frustrating loss,” Josi said. “At the end of the day when you lose a game, you’re not satisfied. We have to keep playing hard and put this one behind us.”
“We’re in the business of winning hockey games, and it didn’t happen today,” Laviolette said. “We’ll look at it and we’ll work to be better. There’re a couple of games in the last 15 where I don’t think we competed very hard or we didn’t play very hard; I didn’t think that was the case today. At the end of the day, we’re in our building, it’s a division game and we needed a better result.”
Notes:
With 17,760 in attendance on Saturday, the Preds set a record for a hockey game at Bridgestone Arena.
Matt Irwin and Cody McLeod were scratched for the Preds on Saturday against the Avalanche.
The Predators will conclude their three-game homestand on Monday night when they welcome the Edmonton Oilers to Bridgestone Arena before jetting off to St. Louis to face the Blues on Tuesday.
