Philipp Grubauer celebrated his 200th career NHL game by padding his league-leading stats.
The Avalanche goalie late Monday night backstopped his team to its seventh consecutive victory with a 5-1 triumph against the Arizona Coyotes at Gila River Arena. Grubauer, the winning goalie in each of those seven games, collected his career-high 19th victory and lowered his league-low goals-against average to 1.71.
He was staring at what would have been his career-high-extending sixth shutout of the season before the Coyotes scored a power-play goal late in the third period to get within 3-1.
Colorado (20-8-2) got goals from forwards Pierre-Edouard Bellemare, Mikko Rantanen, Nazem Kadri and Joonas Donskoi (two). The Avs led 2-0 after the first period and 3-0 entering the third. Donskoi scored an empty-netter before adding his second of the game in the final minute.
Kadri redirected Andre Burakovsky’s shot past goalie Antti Raanta midway through the second period as the Avs scored in their 16th consecutive period. Donskoi’s empty-net goal made it 17 straight frames with a goal. They have outscored their last three opponents 16-2 and are now 11-2-1 in their last 14 games and 5-1 in their last six road games.
“We are pretty controlled. We are understanding the way we have to play to win those games,” Bellemare said. “It’s not like we are too high on ourselves. We are hungry to play better. This is kind of the way we wanted to be in the beginning of the season. We didn’t find that right away. I feel like now, we’re understanding what is the Avs way to play.”
Rantanen has a league-high 10 goals this month, and his 18 on the year are tied for third.
“Obviously, I don’t go to the game thinking about, ‘I have to score.’ Usually, it doesn’t happen if you think about it that way,” Rantanen said. “I just try to play the right way. Now, we’re getting the bounces — myself and as a team, too. I think we earned it. We fought it for a little bit … Now it’s going well for myself and for the team mostly. We just have to keep it going.”
The Avalanche, which concludes the two-game set against the Coyotes on Tuesday in the same building, got better as the game went on. Shots were just 3-3 late in the first period before Colorado produced five of the next six shots to take a 2-0 lead into the first intermission.
Bellemare scored at 14:22 and Rantanen doubled the lead just 1:06 later. Bellemare buried a behind-the-net feed from linemate Matt Calvert to cap a long offensive-zone possession period, and Rantanen scored off the rush with a laser wrist shot.
Bellemare’s goal was his third of the season. Rantanen extended his scoring streak to six games, as did linemate Nathan MacKinnon, who assisted on the goal.
Footnotes. Avs coach Jared Bednar won for the 165th time behind the Avalanche bench to tie Marc Crawford for second behind Bob Hartley (193). Crawford, however, won 30 of his games with the Quebec Nordiques in 1994-95, the season before the franchise moved to Denver. … The Avs are now 18-3-1 when scoring the first goal of the game. … Goalie Jonas Johansson, who was acquired Saturday from Buffalo, served as Grubauer’s backup. He might make his Avalanche debut Tuesday. … The Avs used the same forwards and defensemen from Saturday’s 6-0 win over Minnesota, with forward Logan O’Connor again the odd-man-out. … Colorado reached 40 points on Saturday in its 29th game, marking just the fourth time it has reached 40 in less than 30 games. The Avs did it last season with the exact same record (19-8-2). … The Avs were coming off a nine-game homestand, going 7-1-1 to tie the second-best homestand of nine or more games in NHL history.
