The Colorado Avalanche weren’t able to extend their series lead in Game 2 of their first-round Stanley Cup Playoff series against the Dallas Stars, but had some bright moments despite losing 4-3 in the extra frame. 

While the team looks to reintegrate Gabriel Landeskog in the coming days, their fourth line and depth have stood out in the early parts of the series, with Parker Kelly, Jack Drury and Logan O’Connor taking up the bottom of the Game 2 lineup. 

On Tuesday’s episode of Daily Faceoff Live, Tyler Yaremchuk and Frank Seravalli are joined by Guerilla Sports’ Colorado Avalanche reporter, Jesse Montano, to break it all down. 

Seravalli: Super impressed by the Avalanche’s fourth line last night. I know it was a game of sort of fourth lines with Blackwell getting the winner, but I guess maybe I didn’t properly recognize before how much of a weapon that they can be for this team. Jared Bednar trusts them, and that could be a big difference-maker for this team and the long haul of a 25-game playoff run, if it gets that far. 

I think before, I might have looked at them and said they don’t have enough juice in their bottom. So the depth of this team has changed pretty significantly over the course of this year, hasn’t it?

Montano: One of the conversations that we had right before the playoffs was, especially with this team healthy, we’re going to the playoffs here with a version of this Avalanche team that maybe not a lot of people have seen. I mean, geez, I cover them every day, and I don’t know if I’ve seen this, the healthy, full version of the Avalanche.

That fourth line is something, especially when they added Charlie Coyle, and you were able to drop Jack Drury down… Knowing what kind of player Logan O’Connor is, having the benefit of seeing him every day. We looked at that and said, ‘Hey, that could be a little bit of a secret weapon,’ especially if you are eventually adding Gabe Landeskog back into the mix, and now you can drop a guy like Joel Kiviranta down in the mix on that fourth line.

We refer to them as ‘Jared Bednar guys’ – the three guys that make up the bottom part of the line. It’s just nothing but work, physicality, and they make your life miserable. Shift in, shift out. 

We heard Jared Bednar compare them to the third line from 2022, which was Darren Helm, Logan O’Connor, and Andrew Cogliano, and that line was a huge difference maker for the Avs en route to their Stanley Cup. So I think with Andrew Cogliano being part of the front office, they’ve tried to shape that fourth line in the image of that one, and I think they’ve done a pretty good job.

You can catch the full segment and the rest of the episode here…