LAS VEGAS – Five minutes into Game 4, the whole Colorado Avalanche season flickered in front of the hockey world like a loose puck on bad ice.
Cale Makar, of all people, appeared to be sprung in alone – the exact guy you’d script for the moment. But Nathan MacKinnon’s neutral‑zone feed was a touch off. Makar reached, lunged, stabbed… and watched it skitter off his stick and into the corner.
That was the Avs’ playoffs in one misfire.
Brayden McNabb, from the top of his own circle, launched a perfect Hail Mary flip over two lines – a moonshot that seemed to scrape the rafters at T-Mobile Arena – that Mark Stone gloved down at the opposing blue line while in full stride. Stone walked in alone, froze Mackenzie Blackwood with a backhand to forehand deke, and tucked it home.
One team’s near‑miss. The other’s dagger.
A microcosm of a sweep no one saw coming, and one the heavily favoured Presidents’ Trophy winners will be chewing on all summer.
Colorado wasn’t miles off. They were inches off. Half‑steps off. A hair late, a shade wide, a touch hesitant. And against a Vegas team that’s bigger, deeper, hungrier, and cleaner than they’ve ever been, those tiny gaps became the difference.
Every game, the Golden Knights found the extra goal, the extra save.
If either MacKinnon or Makar were anywhere close to healthy, you wonder if that opening‑minute pass connects and Makar finishes. But we’ll never know. Stone’s early strike wasn’t just a goal, it was the beginning of the end.
A season of wire‑to‑wire domination ended with a footnote: the most shocking sweep since John Tortorella’s Blue Jackets toppled Tampa in 2019.
Logan O’Connor said he felt humiliated.
“We found ways to lose hockey games,” said captain Gabe Landeskog.
“I think the course of the regular season, and in the first two rounds, it was the opposite. At times I thought we deserved better, but they’re a good hockey team. They’re desperate and played hard.”
After losing just one of their first nine playoff games, the Avs ran into a team now on a 19‑4‑1 heater since Tortorella arrived and famously vowed to “stay out of the way.”
At the coach’s insistence, Vegas didn’t just clog lanes, they erased them. Colorado couldn’t get shots through, couldn’t get bodies to the net, couldn’t get Vegas scrambling. And when they finally did? Carter Hart swallowed everything like a Roomba with fresh batteries.
After Stone’s opener, the rest felt like a long, slow death march. While playing a smothering defence, Vegas actually had 22 of the game’s 31 high‑danger chances.
Their best game of the series.
In the third, the Knights mucked it up, allowed just seven shots, and added an insurance marker from Cole Smith with six minutes left.
Landeskog’s goal with two minutes left made it 2–1 and silenced a raucous Fortress. Briefly. But as the Avs’ last‑minute push fizzled, the crowd went bonkers.
As part of the on-ice celly, as they prepped to bring out the Clarence Campbell Bowl, Mitch Marner turned to no one in particular and screamed up at the heavens. The crowd ate it up.
“A special moment,” said the Conn Smythe frontrunner who has flipped the narrative on his perennial springtime blues.
“There’s been some dark times in hockey for myself, honestly. Thankful for my family, my brother, my mom and dad, my wife, all my friends around me. That was a moment to express some joy and some fun there. I’ll enjoy it for the night and be ready to go to work.”
MacKenzie Blackwood’s first appearance of the series made you wonder if Colorado could’ve stolen one earlier with him in net. But there’s no more wondering anymore.
When MacKinnon said before the series that it would go seven, we thought he was being generous. No one saw it ending this way.
MacKinnon didn’t make himself available afterwards. Team personnel said he was getting treatment.
Asked about the injury that kept him out of the first two games of the series, Makar was straight class.
“I’m not, I’m not the type of guy to talk about that,” he said.
“I did everything I can to feel good and come back and feel confident in my play, and felt 100 per cent out there.”
Cue debates over Jared Bednar’s future, and rumours swirling around GM Chris MacFarland leaving for Nashville.
None of that changes the truth: the Avs were a half‑step behind a Vegas team now heading to its third Stanley Cup Final in nine seasons.
The Avs weren’t blown out. They weren’t embarrassed. They were simply beaten by a team that executed every little thing a tiny bit better. And in the playoffs, the little things aren’t little. They’re everything.
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