Joel Quenneville, when he coached the Colorado Avalanche, always used to say, “If you don’t score on your 5-on-3, you don’t win the hockey game.”
For about the first 54 minutes of Sunday’s Avs game in Detroit at (this will never seem right in saying) Little Caesar’s Arena, Coach Q’s old bromide looked as big a lock as anything said this century. The Avs fumbled, bumbled and stumbled their way through their first five power-play opportunities against the Red Wings, including a failed two-man advantage of 48 seconds in the second period.
The Wings, meanwhile, took a two-goal lead into the final few minutes of regulation after a Niklas Kronwall power-play goal.