Colorado Avalanche have a mountain to climb to beat Winnipeg Jets

Frank Seravalli was joined by Colby Cohen to discuss the upcoming Jets/Avalanche series and who will come away with the win on the latest episode of Daily Faceoff Live.

Frank Seravalli: Who do you have in the Winnipeg Jets/Colorado Avalanche series?

Colby Cohen: This is a tough one. If you’re a Winnipeg Jets fan and you’re watching this, you can hate me and I deserve it. I’m going with the Colorado Avalanche, with the uncertainty in goal, I’m not picking against Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar and the rest of the Avalanche. They didn’t finish the season great but they didn’t either in 2022 when they went on to win the Stanley Cup.

I know how well Winnipeg is built, Adam Lowry is as effective as any bottom-six player in the league is. I think Morrissey doesn’t get nearly the credit he deserves for how good he’s been over the last couple of seasons and then there’s Connor Hellebuyck in net. But at the end of the day I just can’t do it, I can’t pick against MacKinnon, Makar, Rantanen and the list goes on. I like Colorado in seven, even though that means they’re winning on the road in game seven which they haven’t done all season, they haven’t been good on the road.

The Winnipeg whiteout is going to be difficult to play against but my gut tells me don’t bet against the Colorado Avalanche, so Frank do we part ways on this or are we in lockstep again?

Frank Seravalli: We do because you went with your heart and not your head and I did a Jets playoff preview today with Josh Morrissey and he said, “we have as good a shot as any time I’ve been here”. That’s a team that went to the conference final in 2018. I love everything about this matchup for Winnipeg. It couldn’t be better in my opinion.

They’re 3-0 this season against the Colorado Avalanche and they’ve outscored them 17-4. You might say oh the last one was a lopsided game with a 7-0 win but even if they won 1-0 they’d still have outscored them 11-4 and by the way why does that last game not count, it was for home ice in this series and they stopped them. I think there’s something to that this is just a stylistically poor matchup for the Avs. And the reason for that is they love creating speed and harnessing that through the neutral zone and on the rush.

They also take chances and give them up more than almost any other team, with that said and a Winnipeg team that can defend and collapse with Adam Lowry a guy who got Selke love from me. When you have all those things come together, all you need to do is be opportunistic enough against Alexandar Georgiev who goes into the playoffs on maybe the shakiest ground with a sub .900 save percentage this season. I have the Jets winning in six over the Avalanche, you could call it an upset but it’s not really one because they finished higher in the standings and I think for a reason.

You can watch the rest of the episode here: