LOS ANGELES (AP) — Cale Makar scored the tiebreaking goal, Scott Wedgewood made 24 saves and the top-seeded Colorado Avalanche moved to the brink of the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs with a 4-2 victory over the Los Angeles Kings on Thursday night.
Gabriel Landeskog and Artturi Lehkonen scored on fortunate deflections for the Presidents' Trophy-winning Avalanche, who went up 3-0 in the series with another narrow win over the persistent Kings.
Trevor Moore and Adrian Kempe scored and Anton Forsberg stopped 19 shots for the Kings. They are a loss away from being eliminated in the first round for the fifth consecutive season.
Game 4 is Sunday in Los Angeles. A loss would end the 20-year career of Kings captain Anze Kopitar, who is retiring after the season.
Los Angeles scored two goals for the first time in the series, but couldn't find a tying goal after Kempe scored on a power play with 4:03 to play. Instead, Brock Nelson scored into LA's empty net with 2:18 left.
Los Angeles hasn't won a playoff round in six previous tries since raising the Stanley Cup in 2014, and this loss was the Kings' seventh straight postseason defeat dating to last spring.
After grinding out a pair of 2-1 victories in Denver, the Avalanche again took care of business in LA with fundamentally sound hockey — and a good bit of luck this time.
Landeskog put the Avs ahead in the opening minutes with a fluke goal when his wrist shot hit the end boards and caromed back perfectly to deflect in off Forsberg’s skate.
Colorado then got another fortunate bounce during a Kings power play in the third period. When Lehkonen and Logan O’Connor broke out on an odd-man rush, Lehkonen’s pass deflected off the back of Kempe’s skate and ricocheted through Forsberg’s legs with 12:21 to play.
Los Angeles played another strong defensive game against superstar Nathan MacKinnon — who still hasn't scored a goal — and the powerhouse Avs. But offense remains the fatal flaw of the Kings, who were the only team in the bottom third of the NHL in scoring to make the playoffs.
Los Angeles has four goals on 76 shots against Colorado.
Bolstered by their home crowd, the Kings responded to Landeskog's lucky goal early in Game 3 with appropriate urgency. After controlling stretches of play, LA evened it early in the second period when Quinton Byfield backhanded a puck to the crease for Moore to deflect home.
But Makar put Colorado back ahead later in the second, dangling just inside the blue line and firing a brilliant wrist shot through traffic into the top corner. The perennial Norris Trophy candidate has 23 playoff goals — second-most among active defensemen — in 82 career games, memorably scoring eight during his Conn Smythe Trophy-winning performance during the Avs' championship run in 2022.
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