Colorado Practices Ahead of Southern California Back-to-Back

In the middle of a stretch that has the team playing four games in six days, the Colorado Avalanche held a 30-minute practice on Wednesday to prepare for its first back-to-back set of the season.
The Avs are coming off a 3-2 win at the Los Angeles Kings on Tuesday night and Colorado will face the Kings again on Thursday before visiting the Anaheim Ducks on Friday and Sunday.
Thursday's contest opens the first of seven back-to-back matchups for the Avalanche this season. The Avs played 12 of these sets last year, finishing with a 9-3-0 record in the first contest and a 6-5-1 mark in the second.

Wednesday's on-ice session featured a few warmup drills and then focused some special-teams work, allowing the players to get a few reps in with Thursday's morning skate likely being optional for the players.
"I think what we are going to do is go optional tomorrow morning with the back-to-back coming up and just guys taking what they need on game days here for the next couple days," head coach Jared Bednar said. "We took everyone out, we did a little flow and go, got up and moving and then did some power play and penalty kill again today and then called it [after] that."

Absent from the practice was forward Andre Burakovsky (upper body) and goaltender Pavel Francouz (lower body), who both missed Tuesday's outing in Los Angeles and are day-to-day with their injuries.
Philipp Grubauer has been in the crease for each of Colorado's three games so far this season and with Francouz temporarily out of the lineup, prospect netminder Hunter Miska could make his first NHL start in the near future. Miska has played in one game in the league, making a relief appearance with the Arizona Coyotes in the 2018-19 campaign.
"I'm staying open to changing on the fly a little bit, but certainly we're not going to have Grubi play every game, he's already played three," said Bednar. "We're in the middle of four-in-six, and there's no break coming out of that [stretch] either. We're playing every second night coming out of that, even after we travel home. We have to make sure that we're taking care of him.
"[Grubauer] feels really good. He wants the net, but I think what we're going to have to do is that we're going to have to look to Miska or Frankie here, as soon as we figure out what the deal is with Frankie and how long he's going to be out. We have to make a plan and again just be open to change in that plan as we move on here."

BRINGING D-MEN UP TO SPEED

Wednesday's session was the first time that newly-acquired defenseman Greg Pateryn was on the ice with his new teammates. Pateryn joined the Avalanche on Tuesday when the club completed a trade with the Minnesota Wild that included Ian Cole.
Bednar noted after practice that Pateryn could enter the lineup as soon as Thursday, and the bench boss also wants to insert prospect Bowen Byram into a game in the near future as well.
"We brought [Pateryn] up to speed with some of the systems and how we want to play and went through some of the training camp meetings that we had for different parts of our structure," said Bednar. "Same kind of things we did with Bo earlier in the week, so those guys are up to speed… He's a guy that is an option for us tomorrow.
"I'd say basically my idea was to get Bo in at some point later this week, and we're still trying to pick the right day for that and we'll see. We'll have some conversations with (general manager) Joe (Sakic) even later today and try and get a plan going for the rest of the week."

PRACTICE LINES

Colorado used the same forward combinations at practice as it did at the end of its game on Tuesday against Los Angeles. The defensive pairings also mixed and matched during the session, which did not include a lot of 5-on-5 drills.
92 Gabriel Landeskog - 29 Nathan MacKinnon - 96 Mikko Rantanen
20 Brandon Saad - 91 Nazem Kadri - 13 Valeri Nichushkin
17 Tyson Jost - 37 J.T. Compher - 72 Joonas Donskoi
11 Matt Calvert - 41 Pierre-Edouard Bellemare
61 Martin Kaut - 44 Kiefer Sherwood
7 Devon Toews - 8 Cale Makar
27 Ryan Graves - 49 Samuel Girard
9 Dennis Gilbert - 22 Conor Timmins
28 Greg Pateryn - 4 Bowen Byram
6 Erik Johnson
31 Philipp Grubauer
32 Hunter Miska
30 Adam Werner