The Colorado Avalanche and the Dallas Stars are going at it in a first-round series that could very easily be a conference finals matchup. The two division rivals both racked up over 100 points during the regular season, leaving hockey fans drooling over the heavyweight battle.

Game 1 was close for most of the night, but the Avalanche pulled away over the final two periods to get a 5-1 win in Dallas and take control of home-ice advantage in the series. Despite the final score, the Avs got two late goals to make the score lopsided in the end and one of those came with an empty net.

Don't let that fool you. For the first 50 minutes of this game, the Avalanche and the Stars played a physical brand of hockey where it was very difficult to get quality scoring chances when both teams were at even strength. Both had their opportunities on the power play, but this will be a tightly-contested battle as long as the two squads are playing five-on-five.

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Avalanche head coach Jared Bednar knows that this is going to be a long, physical series and that his team will have to capitalize on its chances in order to come out on top. He thinks that in order to put goals on the board, you're going to have to work hard around the net, per Taylor Baird of NHL.com.

“You’re not going to score on the perimeter, same thing with our guys,” Bednar said, per Baird. “If you want to score goals, you have to get to the interior of the ice and you have to get there repeatedly because they are good goalies on both sides of it. So, obviously that’s the goal of every team, not just to sit on the perimeter and shoot pucks. So, I thought we did a nice job. We got to some rebounds, and we created some good looks both on the rush and 5-on-5 in the zone.”

Now, the Avalanche will be hungry to take Game 2 in Dallas and really take control of the series before heading back to Denver late in the week. At some point, the Avs are expected to get Gabriel Landeskog back, so they seem to be picking up steam at the right time.