Avalanche Rolls Over Red Wings

The Red Wings’ road to a third consecutive Stanley Cup has become riddled with potholes, and no amount of rationalizing could hide that after the Avalanche shredded their vaunted defense and drove goaltender Bill Ranford to the bench for the second successive game.

Scoring first for the first time in the series and bottling up the Red Wings early with a neutral-zone trap, the Avalanche rolled to a 6-2 victory Thursday before a stunned crowd of 19,983 at Joe Louis Arena and tied the teams’ Western Conference semifinal series at two games each. The Red Wings are left to hope Chris Osgood will be their savior Sunday, when he’s expected to return from the knee injury that has kept him out of this series.

“It was a down-home butt-kicking we got,” Detroit left wing Wendel Clark said. “That’s about all I can say.”

Game 5 will be Sunday at Denver’s McNichols Arena, where the Avalanche lost the first two games of the series. Game 6 will be Tuesday at Detroit; a seventh game, if necessary, will be next Thursday at Colorado.

“We’re back in it,” Theo Fleury said after Colorado improved its road playoff record to 5-0. “In a situation like this, you come in and say, ‘Let’s simplify it. Let’s be disciplined. Let’s not try to do it all on one shift.’ We just played a much simpler game, and it was a great formula for success.”

The simple truth for the Red Wings was they couldn’t get any kind of offensive flow or defensive consistency. Colorado scored off faceoffs, off rebounds, off battles behind the net and in the corners, and it never let up. Goalie Patrick Roy frustrated the Red Wings until a shot caromed off the skate of Colorado defenseman Greg de Vries and was credited to Vyacheslav Kozlov with 5:20 to play; Kozlov scored again, with 43 seconds to play, but by then, Joe Louis Arena looked more like a ghost town than the capital of Hockeytown.

“To come here and win two, I can’t say enough about the effort the guys put in,” said Adam Deadmarsh, who scored twice and assisted on Chris Drury’s goal 88 seconds into the game. “This was a big win for us.”

This isn’t the first time the Red Wings have faced adversity on the trail of the Stanley Cup: last spring, they overcame a 2-1 deficit against Phoenix in the first round and a 1-0 deficit against St. Louis in the West semifinals. But the Avalanche may be the most talented team the Red Wings have faced, and reversing course won’t be easy.

“Nothing went really well. The more things went against us, the more we forced issues and played right into their hands,” Brendan Shanahan said. “When you force things, you play right into the trap. . . . That’s the kind of wakeup call we need because we’d only be lying to ourselves if we said it was a close game. It was probably good that we got embarrassed.”

The rout began at 1:28, when Drury flipped the rebound of a shot by Sandis Ozolinsh past Ranford. Deadmarsh, unchecked, poked in the rebound of a Peter Forsberg shot at 7:07 of the second period, and rookie Milan Hejudk stuffed in a pass from Forsberg during a Colorado power play at 14:04 for a 3-0 lead.

That was the last of Ranford, who was again replaced by third-stringer Norm Maracle. He held the Avalanche off as long as he could, which wasn’t very long. Forsberg came around the net for an unassisted goal at 8:21 of the third period and Valeri Kamensky--playing his second consecutive game after missing nearly two months because of a broken arm--redirected a shot by Ozolinsh past Maracle at 11:28, sending fans streaming toward the exits.

“We have to play better defensively and get back to how we played in Game 1 and Game 2,” Detroit defenseman Nicklas Lidstrom said. “We tried to match up with them, but nothing seemed to matter.”

What matters now is which team can overcome what has become a league-wide home-ice disadvantage. Home teams are merely 27-32 in postseason play.

“We’ve got to try to play the way we did the last two games,” Fleury said. “I expect Detroit to come out with their best game. They’re Stanley Cup champions for a reason. We’re going to have to come out with the same fire and desire we did in these two games.”