Round 1 Takeaways: How the Avalanche and Bruins won their series

As the opening round series results start to roll in, we're going to highlight some key trends that helped push the winning teams over the top. Since styles do tend to make fights this time of year, it's useful to identify what teams have specifically been doing well to generate positive outcomes. 

Rather than just doing traditional recaps of what happened though, we'll hopefully be able to spin it forward by pulling some actionable bits of information out that will be relevant for the following round(s) to come as well. 

We'll kick things off with the first two round one matchups to be decided -- the Colorado Avalanche succinctly sweeping the St.Louis Blues, and the Boston Bruins pulling away from the Washington Capitals in five.