Jared Bednar and Brett Heimlich were in a slump. But they didn't shy away from the moment in Central Division crunch time Saturday. Confidence unfazed, they took the shot.
At a coach's challenge.
In one of the most consequential moments of the Avalanche's season, Bednar snapped a 54-game streak in which he had not won a coach's challenge. After Dallas had scored to seemingly cut a 3-1 Avalanche lead in half with 10:54 remaining, Colorado's bench asked for a video review. The NHL determined that Ryan Suter of the Stars committed goalie interference by forcing Logan O'Connor into Alexandar Georgiev.
"I was involved in the play, so I didn't really have a great sense of what was going to happen," O'Connor said. "… Bit of a panic mode there."
As Dallas celebrated the goal, Georgiev immediately confronted referees about the play. What ensued was a swift process to make a risky decision in a tense, vital game. Bednar had his own opinion based on watching the goal live. He consulted Heimlich, the Avs' video coach. Heimlich agreed.
"The second I saw it, I thought it was goalie interference," Bednar said. "… You can't go into the goalie on your own, and you can't force someone else in there. … He has no chance at making that save when the rebound popped out. So I thought there was a really good chance it was getting turned over."
Bednar and Heimlich barely had time to pause and consider the cost of losing the challenge: They would be penalized with a two-minute minor, giving Dallas a power play late in a one-goal game — a game that, if the Avs lost, would have pushed them toward the periphery of the division title race with Dallas and Minnesota.
"It could have been a momentum shift there," O'Connor said.
But Bednar maintained that his confidence level going into the challenge was "high." Colorado's lead rarely felt in doubt after the successful challenge, and with Minnesota's coinciding loss to the Golden Knights, the Avs reclaimed their own destiny with the highest point percentage in the Central.
It begs the question: Is there any extra trepidation for an NHL coach when deliberating whether to issue a challenge when the stakes are so high?
"Certainly you want to consider time and score, how your team's playing, what your special teams are doing a little bit," Bednar said. (The Avalanche's penalty kill is playing its best hockey of the season.)
"But I just think the rules are there, and they're in place. There's times you challenge because you feel like you have to, and you want to take a chance and you might not be sure (if you're right). But I think there's a lot of them that you're pretty sure on. And you'd like to think that the league's going to make the right call if you challenge it and you're sure on it."
The added uneasiness in this case was the nature of the challenge. Goalie interference has been inconsistently called, in the team's opinion. The rules surrounding it mystified the Avs during a slump in January, when multiple reviews didn't go their way.
Before Bednar's challenge against the Stars, he had lost three consecutive challenges dating back to Nov. 29, 2022.
"Not exactly," O'Connor said when asked if he understands the goalie interference rule. "I don't know if anyone does except (Heimlich)."
Georgiev was the only other person in Ball Arena who acted confident immediately that the goal had been scored unfairly. But as for whether Bednar uses the goalie's reaction as a guide, the coach was definitive: "No. Never. Because they think every goal is interference. … They can be adamant that they got bumped. But you have to know the reason why they're getting bumped."
Said Georgiev on why he was so confident: "I just felt that somebody fell on me."
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