It’s hard to say when, exactly, Alexandar Georgiev truly began to win some hearts and change some minds on Tuesday night.

Maybe it was in the back half of the second period; that was when the Colorado Avalanche, for the first time in their first-round Stanley Cup playoff series against the Winnipeg Jets, actually managed to hold a lead for more than, oh, two minutes or thereabouts. Maybe it was when the Avs walked into the locker room up 4-2 with 20 minutes to play.

Maybe it was midway through the third, when a series of saves by the Avalanche’s beleaguered starting goaltender helped preserve their two-goal buffer. Maybe it was when the buzzer sounded after their 5-2 win. Maybe it didn’t happen until the Avs made it into their locker room at Canada Life Centre, tied 1-1 with the Jets and headed for Denver.

At some point, though, it should’ve happened. If you were watching, you should’ve realized that Colorado — after a 7-6 Game 1 loss that had us all talking not just about all those goals, but at least one of the guys who’d allowed them — had squared things up, thanks in part to … well, that same guy.

Georgiev, indeed, was the story of Game 2, stopping 28 of 30 shots, improving as the game progressed and providing a lesson on how quickly things can change in the playoffs — series to series, game to game, period to period, moment to moment. The narrative doesn’t always hold. Facts don’t always cooperate. Alexandar Georgiev, for one night and counting, was not a problem for the Colorado Avalanche. He was, in direct opposition to the way he played in Game 1, a solution. How could we view him as anything else?

He had a few big-moment saves, and most of them came midway through the third period with his team up 4-2. There he was with 12:44 remaining, stopping a puck that had awkwardly rolled off Nino Niederreiter’s stick; two missed posts by the Avs at the other end had helped spring Niederreiter for a breakaway. Game 1 Georgiev doesn’t make that save.

There he was, stopping Nikolaj Ehlers from the circle a few minutes later. There wasn’t an Avs defender within five feet, and there was nothing awkward about the puck Ehlers fired at his shoulder. Game 1 Georgiev gets scored on twice.

(That one might’ve been poetic justice. It was Ehlers who’d put the first puck of the night on Georgiev — a chip from center ice that he stopped, and that the crowd in Winnipeg greeted with the ol’ mock cheer. Whoops.)

By the end of it all, Georgiev had stared down Connor Hellebuyck and won, saving nearly 0.5 goals more than expected according to Natural Stat Trick, giving the Avalanche precisely what they needed and looking almost nothing like the guy we’d seen a couple days before. Conventional wisdom coming into this series was twofold: That the Avs have firepower, high-end talent and an overall edge — slight as it may be — on Winnipeg, and that Georgiev is shaky enough to nuke the whole thing.

That wasn’t without merit, either. Georgiev’s .897 save percentage in the regular season was six percentage points below the league average, and he hadn’t broken even in expected goals allowed (minus-0.21). He’d been even worse down the stretch, putting up an .856 save percentage in his final eight appearances, and worse still in Game 1, allowing seven goals on 23 shots and more than five goals more than expected. That’s not bad; that’s an oil spill. Writing him off would’ve been understandable. Writing off Jared Bednar for rolling him out there in Game 2 would’ve been understandable. Writing the Avs off — for all of Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar’s greatness — would’ve been understandable.

It just wouldn’t have been correct.

The fact that this all went down now, four days into a two-month ordeal, is a gift — because the postseason thus far has been short on surprises, almost as a rule. The Rangers and Oilers are overwhelming the Capitals and Kings. The Hurricanes are halfway done with the Islanders. The Canucks are struggling with the Predators. Panthers–Lightning is tight, but one team is clearly better than the other. Bruins–Maple Leafs is a close matchup featuring psychic baggage that we don’t have time to unpack. In Golden Knights–Stars, Mark Stone came back and scored a huge goal.

None of that should shock you. None of that should make you blink.

Georgiev being good enough for Colorado, though? After what we saw in Game 1? Strange, surprising and completely true. For now.

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The LA Kings tried every trick in the book to get the Edmonton Oilers off their game last night.

Hacks after the whistle, punches to the face, and interference with line changes were just some of the things that the Oilers had to endure, and throughout it all, there was not an ounce of retaliation.

All that badgering by the Kings resulted in at least two penalties against them and fuelled a red-hot Oilers power play that made them pay with three goals on four chances. That was by design for Edmonton, who knew that LA was going to try to pester them as much as they could.

That may have worked on past Oilers teams, but not this one.

“We’ve been in a series now for the third year in a row with these guys,” Kane said after practice this morning. “We know them, they know us… it’s one of those things where maybe it makes it a little easier to kind of laugh it off, walk away, or take a shot.

“That type of stuff isn’t gonna affect us.”

EDM LAK G1. April 22, 2024. Pierre-Luc Dubois interference penalty on Connor McDavid. 🎥: Sportsnet | NHL pic.twitter.com/15zrQX3D6Q

— Nation Network Media (@NationNMedia) April 23, 2024

Once upon a time, this type of play would get under the Oilers’ skin and result in retaliatory penalties. Yet, with a few hard-knock lessons handed down to them in the past few seasons, it seems like the team is as determined as ever to cut the extracurriculars and focus on getting revenge on the scoreboard.

Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, the longest-tenured player on this Oilers team, had to keep his emotions in check with Kings defender Vladislav Gavrikov, who punched him in the face early in the game. The easy reaction would be to punch back, but the veteran Nugen-Hopkins took his licks and wound up scoring later in the game.

“It’s going to be physical, the emotions are high, and there’s probably going to be some stuff after the whistle,” Nugent-Hopkins told reporters this morning. “I think it’s important to stay poised out there and not retaliate and just play through the whistles and let the other stuff just kind of happen.”

Nuge on the doorstep pots one on the power play! 🚪 pic.twitter.com/6nUeQJZASl

— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) April 23, 2024

Oilers head coach Kris Knoblauch also noticed his team’s discipline. Playoff hockey is full of emotion, and keeping those in check to focus on the larger goal is difficult. He was happy with how his team set the tone.

“It’s not necessarily easy to do,” Knoblauch said. “You get punched in the face and sometimes the referees feel it’s enough to call a penalty, sometimes it’s not… You just have to take them, and sometimes, you get rewarded with the power play.

“I liked our guy’s response and we want to be sticking up for each other, we want to have that pack mentality, but it’s really important that we’re not the ones taking that extra penalty.”

There is no doubt that the Kings will continue to poke and prod at the Oilers as the series continues. Keeping those retaliations in check will only get more difficult, but if the team can continue to succeed on the scoreboard, it could get easier.

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In the middle of a record haul at the Tokyo Olympics, Canada’s women’s swim team had one letdown – the 4×200-metre freestyle relay.

Canada had taken bronze in the event at Rio 2016 and again at the 2019 world aquatics championships. The team looked good for another medal.

On the day of the final, a Chinese team that was not considered a contender surprised everyone, winning in world-record time. Canada came fourth.

A battling result, but still disappointing. It looks a little worse than that now.

Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that nearly half the Chinese swim team failed a drug test seven months before the Tokyo Games. Twenty-three swimmers tested positive for trimetazidine, or TMZ.

TMZ is a synthetic substance. You’re not going to pick it up because you’ve chosen the wrong hot-dog vendor.

China was allowed to do its own investigation into the mass positive. That probe determined the athletes had been exposed to TMZ in tainted food at a team hotel. How exactly so many of them ingested it, while others did not, wasn’t explained.

Unusually, no announcement was made about the positive tests, and no one was suspended while the investigation was under way. The World Anti-Doping Agency knew what was going on, but decided the best way to determine if China had done anything wrong was to ask China to look into it. When China gave China the all clear, WADA signed off.

One of those who tested positive was Zhang Yufei. Zhang won three medals in Tokyo, one of them as part of the 4x200m relay team.

The swimming world is now playing doping leapfrog throughout those Games. The Canadian relay team is on a long list of unlucky losers. Had China’s violations stuck, the medal table would look very different.

It would also have pushed a Games that was on the edge closer to the drop. Few in Japan were super stoked about the world dropping by en masse during what would become that country’s first mass COVID wave.

The main reason the Tokyo Games happened was that so much money had been spent, much more was still owed, and insurers were not willing to write down 10 or 15 billion.

Picking a fight with China in that precarious moment could not have seemed like a great idea. Even more precarious – the next Games, to be held six months later in Beijing.

As an event, at absolute best, Beijing 2022 was going to be a very expensive bummer (which it absolutely was). That’s the sort of party that’s easy to call off.

You don’t need to be a Reddit obsessive to see what happened here. The Chinese swim team got caught mid-purge, and the people in charge had to prioritize their response.

Priority No. 1 – the Olympic business.

Priority No. 2 – the Olympic ideals.

They picked money over fairness.

It’s easy to lash them now, so plenty of people are. The head of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency called it “a devastating stab in the back of clean athletes.”

(Is it possible to be undevastatingly stabbed in the back?)

The stickiest criticism involves Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva. She also tested positive for trace amounts of TMZ before an Olympics. She also had one of those ‘maybe the dog gave me steroids’-type excuses.

But since everybody hates Russia, Valieva did not get the benefit of an in-house probe. She was dragged upside-down and backward through the global press and stripped of her medals. There’s your fairness.

It’s fitting that WADA take a reputational beating here. That is its most useful function – to absorb stakeholder rage after another own goal has been scored by the Doping Police.

But out in the real world, no one cares. Of course the Olympics is dirty. The Olympics has spent the last half century repeatedly reminding us of that.

Between Games, the Olympics makes news only two ways – ‘Upcoming host city X is having serious second thoughts’ and ‘So-and-so cheated their way to gold.’

These stories have become so numerous that the only people registering them are the ones who make their living in an Olympics-adjacent business, like sports administration or media.

Those people are happy to complain – complaining is good for trade – but they don’t want things to change. Change is dangerous. Who knows where change will land you?

In this specific instance, real change in the form of zero tolerance could have hobbled one Olympics and gotten the next one cancelled. Then what?

You start cancelling Olympics and people learn to live without them. Sponsors find new things to sponsor. Broadcasters move on.

Better to compromise. Chinese swimmers did a little TMZ. So what? Figure skaters, tennis players, breaststrokers – everybody’s doing it nowadays. It’s like weed for the Marx and Engels crowd.

With all that in mind, here’s something you won’t often read in this space – WADA made the right call.

It’s not like it was going to go swanning into Guangdong province in early 2021, right in the teeth of the pandemic, to figure out what was what. The only way to get any sort of answers was to rely on Chinese investigators. How do you know if they’re on the up and up? You don’t. WADA had two choices – take China’s word for it, or go scorched earth right before the two most tenuously assembled Games in history.

The proof that WADA made the correct choice is that those Games happened. Maybe it would make a different call now, and that might be right, too.

As far as fairness goes, it doesn’t belong in this conversation.

If a Belgian or a Tanzanian gets caught cheating, don’t even bother asking for consideration.

An American? Probably not.

An American everyone knows? Maybe.

A lot of Americans everybody knows? Let’s talk.

This can’t be discussed because once that discussion gets going, it points toward the sort of change no current stakeholder want to think about. If someone who tests positive can negotiate their way out of it and fairness is the goal, isn’t it fairer to stop testing altogether?

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