The best way for the Avalanche to reach its goal of hoist­ing the Stan­ley Cup?

It’s exact­ly what Col­orado showed over the past week in eas­i­ly dis­patch­ing Ari­zona in five games: Force the issue with in-your-face even-strength play, giv­ing its now-healthy pow­er play oppor­tu­ni­ties to shine with the man advantage.

Goal­tend­ing and penal­ty killing are less of a con­cern because the Avs are so fero­cious offen­sive­ly that they can dic­tate pace on any team they play.

Let’s face it: Ari­zona had vir­tu­al­ly no chance of upset­ting Col­orado in the first-round series that end­ed Wednes­day. The Coy­otes didn’t have the speed or skill to defend the Avs, or present much of a counter-attack. In the end — and espe­cial­ly in the last two games, both 7–1 Avalanche wins in Edmon­ton — Ari­zona took penal­ties ear­ly in the defen­sive end and Col­orado rolled out the NHL’s most dan­ger­ous pow­er play.

The Avs scored sev­en times on 20 man-advan­tage oppor­tu­ni­ties for an NHL-lead­ing 35% suc­cess rate in the first round.

They can beat you with Nathan MacKinnon’s wrist shots or one-time slap shots from either cir­cle. They can beat you with Nazem Kadri’s quick one-timer from the top of the crease off Gabe Landeksog’s one-touch pass from the goal line. They can beat you with Mikko Rantanen’s big one-time clap­per from the left cir­cle. They can beat you with what­ev­er Cale Makar’s shot selec­tion is from the point.

If they can’t beat you with bal­let­ic puck move­ment lead­ing to big shots, they aren’t afraid to col­lapse to the front of the net and get a dirty goal.

And, still, if none of that works, the sec­ond unit comes in with even more threats to con­tend with. There’s Andre Burakovsky’s wrist shot from the right wing or J.T. Compher’s and Joonas Donskoi’s abil­i­ty from the left or in front of the net. And all of those looks typ­i­cal­ly start with the high­ly capa­ble play of Sam Girard from the point.

Both units are direct­ed from the bench by assis­tant coach Ray Ben­nett, who is in his 19th NHL sea­son as a pow­er play guru, and third with Colorado.

In eight total post­sea­son games, includ­ing three in the pre-tour­na­ment round-robin, the Avs’ first unit has scored nine pow­er-play goals and the sec­ond has pro­duced two. Com­bined, they are at 30.6% since begin­ning play in Edmonton.

So why was the Avs’ pow­er play ranked 19th at 19.1% through 70 reg­u­lar-sea­son games? Easy answer: The per­son­nel wasn’t like it is now. Injuries all over the map rarely had the Avs’ top offen­sive threats play­ing togeth­er, and a mix­ture of the first and sec­ond units play­ing togeth­er wasn’t as strong.

“We want­ed to click all year (but) you start study­ing the per­son­nel that was miss­ing out of our line­up at dif­fer­ent times. We didn’t have that (first) group of five togeth­er for the bulk of the year. I think it was 14% of the time we had those guys togeth­er,” Avs coach Jared Bed­nar said after his team went 3‑of‑4 on the pow­er play with goals from Kadri, MacK­in­non and Girard to close out the series. “After sort of look­ing at that — they nev­er real­ly got to gel and become the pow­er play we thought they could be at the start of the year.

“That’s not an excuse but going into the sec­ond train­ing camp, after the pause, Ray talks to those guys a lot about prin­ci­ples of what we want to try to do and not get locked in on one play. It lets them be cre­ative and sort of attack in dif­fer­ent ways. We just want­ed to make sure it was run­ning at a cer­tain pace and have a cer­tain attack men­tal­i­ty that was going to make us more dan­ger­ous than we had been in the reg­u­lar season.”

The Avs know they can go far in these play­offs by play­ing their game — which starts with great defense, push­ing the puck up ice and rolling all four lines. With that pres­sure and depth, Col­orado has proven it will draw more penal­ties than it takes, lead­ing to more man-advan­tage oppor­tu­ni­ties. Then the pow­er play can become the difference-maker.

“The guys are just focused. Their exe­cu­tion is great,” Bed­nar said of his first unit in par­tic­u­lar. “Fore­hand to fore­hand pass­es — all the kinds of things Ray gets them talk­ing about, think­ing about, and they’re cre­ative, skill play­ers and we saw the best of them in the past cou­ple games and hope­ful­ly, we can con­tin­ue to play that well and be as dan­ger­ous in a pow­er play on a night­ly basis.”