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MIKE MODANO'S PLAYOFF DIARY - MAY 22 Neutralizing Avalanche's speed is key in series 05/22/99 After the St. Louis series, it was good to get a break because we had some guys who really needed it. It was good to get away and just kind of relax and gear up for the next push. You get into a routine of playing every other day, so you have to get that back and ready to go as soon as possible. As the playoffs go on, I think we have to get stronger. We got away with some victories without playing our best hockey against the Blues. We found ways to win when everybody wasn't playing their best. It's going to take our best effort to beat Colorado. We have to control the Avalanche's speed. The Avalanche is a lot like St. Louis because Colorado wants to spread you out then kill you with its speed. Colorado likes to play through the middle. The Avalanche likes to have a lot of room to make plays, and if you force Colorado out of the middle and make plays along the boards, that fits into what we want to do. Colorado is also similar to our team because it has two top lines. The lines pretty much carried Colorado through the last two or three games against Detroit. The Avalanche has the young guys - Chris Drury and Milan Hejduk - who have played well, too. As the series went on, they got better. Colorado has three quality lines that match up well against ours. To score on Patrick Roy, you have to create as much traffic in front of the net as you can. You have to hang around for the second and third chances. He's good at seeing the first shot. Like a lot of goalies now, he's talented and athletic. And he seems to rise to the occasion. He's the kind of guy who looks forward to this time of year. It's the extra shots, the extra screens, that can make him second-guess himself. I've had a couple of goals against him, a few short-handed ones I was able to get. Some goals he lets in, you think, "How did that go in?" and sometimes he makes saves that you thought for sure were going in. I'm looking forward to this series because Colorado plays a style I like to play. I think the speed of the game really fits in with some of our players. We finally get to have a little pace to a game. There won't be as much clutching and grabbing. It's more what you can do with the puck, the plays you can make, and the transition from defense to offense - things like that. The discipline we have is our positional defensive work. Colorado plays for the high-percentage plays. If you play with good positional defense, you're going to have more opportunities than you would against a physical team. Mike Modano's diary, as told to Staff Writer Bill Nichols, will appear in The News during the playoffs.