It’s All Falling Into Place for Avalanche

It took four years and half a dozen major trades to assemble the Colorado Avalanche’s roster. It may take only four games for the Avalanche to make all that waiting and planning pay off.

The Avalanche moved within a victory of its first Stanley Cup championship Saturday, rallying on second-period goals by Mike Keane and Joe Sakic to grind out a 3-2 victory over the Florida Panthers and take a 3-0 lead in the series. By shutting out the Panthers over the last 40 minutes for the third consecutive game, Colorado maneuvered into position to wrap up the series Monday at Miami Arena and close the book on the Panthers’ storybook season.

“Obviously, we’re in command, but we know they’re not going to give up,” said Sakic, whose wrist shot from the right wing at the three-minute mark of the second period was his sixth game-winning goal of this year’s playoffs, a record for a single season. “We’re looking forward to Monday. We don’t want to go back to Denver to finish it up. We want to win it here.”

Since the best-of-seven format was adopted in 1939, only one team--the 1942 Toronto Maple Leafs--has overcome a 3-0 deficit in the finals. The only other instance in which a team rebounded from a 3-0 deficit in any round occurred in 1975, when the New York Islanders rallied in the quarterfinals against the Pittsburgh Penguins.

Colorado Coach Marc Crawford and his players were careful not to utter anything the Panthers might use as a motivational tool Monday, but they didn’t need to say much. The facts of the game--and the series--spoke volumes. Colorado has outscored Florida, 8-0, in the second period in this series and by a 1-0 margin in the third period. The Avalanche has also held Florida to two power-play goal in 13 attempts.

“One of the reasons we’ve had success is we haven’t looked past the next challenge,” Crawford said. “If we play the way we’re capable of, especially if we keep piling on good habits, I think our club is ready for the next challenge.”

They’ve met the Panthers’ challenge impressively, succeeding where the Boston Bruins, Philadelphia Flyers and Pittsburgh Penguins failed. Then again, none of the Panthers’ previous opponents had in their lineup anyone like Claude Lemieux, who returned from a two-game suspension for an illegal check on Detroit’s Kris Draper and scored a goal at 2:44, in his second shift. Nor did they have so deadly a scorer as Sakic, whose 18 goals leave him one short of the record for goals in a playoff year, shared by Reg Leach of the 1976 Flyers and Jari Kurri of the 1985 Edmonton Oilers.

And the Bruins, Flyers and Penguins didn’t have Patrick Roy in goal. Like Lemieux, Roy has won the Conn Smythe trophy as the most valuable player in the playoffs (1986 for Roy and 1995 for Lemieux). Like Lemieux, Roy was formidable Saturday after a so-so start that left the Panthers leading, 2-1, after one period. Roy finished with 32 saves, quenching the Panthers’ last spark with a point-blank pad stop on right wing Scott Mellanby with five minutes left.

“I think the Panthers played very well in the first period. They came out very strong and their fans were behind them,” Roy said. “After the first period, I thought we were in good shape because it was a 2-1 game and we expected them to come out like that.”

They were actually strong enough to erase the 1-0 lead Colorado built on Lemieux’s goal, which was set up on a clever centering pass by Valeri Kamensky. Ray Sheppard beat a screened Roy at 9:14 for the Panthers’ first goal, setting off a barrage of plastic rat-tossing from the 14,703 fans. They blanketed the ice again at 11:19, when Rob Niedermayer converted the rebound of a shot by Mellanby that Roy had repelled with his left leg, but any remaining rats went untossed because of Colorado’s impenetrable defense.

Stanley Cup Notes

Miami became the 24th city to be host for a Stanley Cup final game since competition for the Cup began in 1983. . . . Florida goalie John Vanbiesbrouck’s 26 victories this season were not a career high, as reported in Saturday’s editions. His career high for victories is 31, set in 1985-86.