Colorado Avalanche Game Day: Ending the home stand with a back to back against the Blues

Colorado Avalanche: 23-8-4

St. Louis Blues: 16-13-6

Puck Drop: 7:00 p.m. MT

Watch: Altitude, BSMW, ESPN+

Listen: Altitude 92.5, AM 950

The Avalanche will start their back-to-back with the St. Louis Blues coming off a 9-3 drubbing of the Arizona Coyotes. The team is firing on all cylinders and have now begun to add elite goal scoring to their already league-best defense.

This is the time of the season when the Avalanche start to build their lead at the top of the standings.

Colorado Avalanche

What’s most amazing about the nine goal outburst from the Avalanche on Wednesday is that none came from Nathan MacKinnon or Cale Makar. While Gabriel Landeskog and Mikko Rantanen have been filling the net, the team’s secondary scoring has also come alive.

Joonas Donskoi is on the heater of all heaters. He has nine goals in his last ten games and could very well be PDOing his way into the Seattle Kraken lineup for next season. With a shooting percentage of 30% on the season, there’s no way he can keep going at this rate but it’s fun to watch him ride it out as long as possible.

UPDATE: Coach Bednar said this morning that Logan O’Connor’s lower body injury is worse than originally thought and that LOC will be out “weeks”. Liam O’Brian - AKA The Official Big Tuna - will take his place in the lineup.

Projected Lines

Forwards

Gabriel Landeskog – Nathan MacKinnon – Mikko Rantanen
Andre Burakovsky – Nazem Kadri – Brandon Saad
Valeri Nichushkin – Tyson Jost – Joonas Donskoi
Liam O’Brien – Pierre-Edouard Bellemare – JT Compher

Defense

Devon Toews – Cale Makar
Jacob MacDonald – Samuel Girard
Ryan Graves – Dan Renouf

St. Louis Blues

The Blues come into this game well rested having not played since last Sunday. Their week off couldn’t have come at a better time as the team has lost fours straight and eight of heir last ten games. They definitely look like they needed a little practice time to get things back on the rails.

David Perron is having a great season, leading the team with 34 points in 35 games while he, Ryan O’Reilly and Brayden Schenn lead in goals with 12 apiece.

The weakness for the Blues has been keeping the puck out of the net as they are currently one of the worst defensive teams in the league while goaltender Jordan Binnington isn’t coming close to living up to the big money contract extension he signed earlier this year.

Projected Lineup:

Jaden Schwartz - Ryan O’Reilly - Vladimir Tarasenko

Mike Hoffman - Brayden Schenn - David Perron

Zach Sanford - Robert Thomas - Jordan Kyrou

Kyle Clifford - Tyler Bozak - Sammy Blais

Torey Krug - Justin Faulk

Marco Scandella - Vince Dunn

Jake Walman - Robert Bortuzzo

Goaltenders

With two games in the next 24 hours, we are likely to see four different goalies in this series. Having been off for a week, Binnington is likely to get the start for the Blues. He comes into the game with a 10-10-5 record and a .903 sv%.

For the Avalanche, we don’t know who will start tonight though we will see both Philipp Grubauer and Jonas Johansson at some point this weekend.