The Avalanche’s season ended with a whimper, a finish worthy of disgust

There’s losing. And then there’s whatever the Colorado Avalanche did to close out their season on Tuesday night.

The Avs were swept by the Vegas Golden Knights in the Western Conference Finals — a result that few saw coming when the playoffs began. But it wasn’t the four-game sweep itself that drew the most-pointed criticism on the airwaves. It was how the team played its way to that fate.

On a Wednesday edition of “Dover and Cecil” on 104.3 The Fan, host Josh Dover pulled no punches in his postmortem.

“It looked like JV versus varsity. That’s what it looked like last night,” Dover said.

The Avalanche, a roster constructed around generational talent, looked physically and competitively overmatched by a Vegas team that simply wanted it more. The skill differential that should have made this a hard-fought series never materialized. What developed instead was a team that appeared to have already accepted its fate long before the final horn.

There was a brief flicker of life late in the third period. After head coach Jared Bednar pulled Mackenzie Blackwood for the extra attacker, the Avalanche scored to make things interesting. But the response only deepened the frustration.

“Immediately as Mackenzie gets off the ice, they score. And you’re like, ‘Okay there is some life here.’ But that was it. A sense of urgency came at two minutes and four seconds left in the hockey game,” Dover said.

That’s the line that lingers. The energy this team should have brought to every shift in an elimination game finally appeared with the clock running out — far too late to matter and too late to forgive.

Dover then ran through the inventory of talent on the roster, which made the lack of effort all the more inexcusable.

“How pathetic are the Colorado Avalanche? When they’re on the brink of elimination, and you have guys that can win the Hart, you have guys like Nathan MacKinnon — on paper, you could put an all-star team together with guys on the Colorado Avalanche. And they didn’t show up until there was two minutes and four seconds left in the game,” he said.

It’s an inventory that makes the result harder to swallow, not easier. The Avalanche aren’t a team short on talent or experience. They are a team built to compete for the Stanley Cup. To bow out the way they did — without a fight, without a pulse — goes against everything the franchise is supposed to represent.

Dover closed with the kind of summation that doesn’t need elaboration.

“What a bunch of — in all aspects of the word — what a bunch of losers!” he said.

There will be plenty of time for measured analysis of what went wrong in the offseason. Last night was not that time. Last night was for honesty. And the honest truth is that the Colorado Avalanche didn’t lose this series. They surrendered it.

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