The officiating complaint needs to die before anything else gets said. Alex Newhook's third-period goal got waved off because his stick was above the crossbar when he redirected the puck in, and that call went through the NHL's video review process under the rule covering high sticks. The system worked the way it's supposed to. If your gripe is that the broadcast didn't have the ideal camera angle to triple-confirm it, that's a conversation about replay technology. Montreal wasn't robbed, and anyone leaning on this to explain the loss is reaching for a crutch instead of an answer.
Montreal took four minor penalties on Saturday night, Colorado took two, and a depleted Avalanche lineup missing Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar scored on one of those Montreal minors while Montreal's own power play went nowhere on its two chances. It wasn't puck luck. A disciplined, well-coached Colorado team, even without its two best players, beat an undisciplined Montreal team that happened to still be sitting atop the Atlantic Division entering the night.
The shot count backs that up. Montreal led in shot share across the game and the totals finished close, more an even game than a beatdown, with Montreal competitive for the full sixty minutes in its own building. It was a team that came out sloppy, leaned on low-percentage stretch passes instead of the short, direct game that had been working for weeks, fell behind after the first period for the first time all season, and then piled penalty on penalty against an opponent with nothing to lose.
RatingThe blame lands on the bench and the room, not on the schedule-makers for giving Colorado an off night to feast on. Josh Anderson cross-checking, Kirby Dach interference, Noah Dobson slashing, Adam Engström hooking: four different players, four different kinds of carelessness, in a single game against a team playing without its two best skaters. You don't draw that up. You coach it out of a team, or you don't, and on this particular Saturday, Montreal didn't.
Colorado was a legitimate team even with MacKinnon and Makar in street clothes. Mackenzie Blackwood stood on his head when he needed to, Artturi Lehkonen had himself a night, and complementary pieces like Fedor Svechkov, Brock Nelson and Nicolas Roy all found the net. A team that can lose two elite players and still roll four lines that finish their chances is a real team, full stop, and nobody should pretend Colorado backed into this.
That actually makes Montreal's performance look worse. If this were a genuinely overmatched Avalanche side stealing a fluke win, you could write it off. Instead a first-place team with a healthy, in-form captain scoring the lone goal of the night let its discipline collapse against exactly the kind of opponent it should have suffocated with structure. Nick Suzuki did his job, scoring Montreal's only goal. Plenty of teammates around him did not do theirs.
A twelve-game point streak snapping in regulation doesn't demand panic. The standings still have Montreal where it wants to be. What it should demand is somebody in that room looking at four careless minor penalties against a short-staffed opponent and calling it what it is: a team that got comfortable the moment it heard MacKinnon and Makar weren't suiting up, and paid for it. The officials didn't do that. Montreal did it to itself.
