Recap: Avalanche Spoil Raanta's Return from Injury

GLENDALE --Coyotes goalie Antti Raanta returned to Arizona's net for the first time in three weeks, but the Colorado Avalanche spoiled his first game back from injury.
J.T. Compher scored two short-handed goals past Raanta, including one on a breakaway, within an 85-second span of the first period to set the tone for a forgettable performance by Raanta and his teammates on Friday night at Gila River Arena.
Colorado won 5-1.

"(Raanta) can't do it alone," Head Coach Rick Tocchet told reporters a few hours before the game. "We have to play well. We have to play smart hockey."
That didn't happen Friday as the Coyotes were sloppy with the puck and allowed the Avalanche to take a 3-0 lead. Up 2-0 after Compher's shorties, Mikko Rantanen, who leads the NHL with 36 points, scored the backbreaker on a second breakaway at 9:39 of the first period.
"I've been feeling good," said Raanta, who missed eight games because of a lower-body injury he suffered while stretching. "Obviously it doesn't really matter how you feel when you don't make the saves ... There were some good things, but not so good things in the first period, and the game was pretty much over so it didn't really matter what you did after that."

Raanta finished with 34 saves. Colorado goalie Philipp Grubauer, who was playing in place of starter Semyon Varlamov, stopped 37 of Arizona's 38 shots.
"Right now we can't chase any game because we're not really getting a lot of production," Tocchet said. "So, we've got to be really clean on certain things, and obviously there were blatant giveaways (in the first period)."
Captain Oliver Ekman-Larsson didn't like how the Coyotes failed to play within the team's system.
"I felt like we went off the game plan a little bit and wanted to do it by ourselves instead of sticking to the game plan and really playing the way we are supposed to play," Ekman-Larsson said. "That's what happens when we don't … We're a good team when we play with structure and we play the way we want to play. If everybody goes out there and plays their own game we're a really, really bad team."

• Derek Stepan, one of the team's alternate captains, was not pleased with how the Coyotes seemingly sleepwalked through the middle part of the first period against one of the NHL's top offensive teams.
"I have my opinions and I'm going to keep them to myself today," Stepan said. "It just wasn't even close to being ready enough to play in an NHL game. We paid the price pretty hard today ... I don't have the answer. I'm a guy that's an older guy on the team who's trying to figure out what's going on. There's some simple ones I can voice that are very easy to fix. I have a tough time having to explain what it means to do these simple things to start a game. I don't want to get too far into it. I'll go to the other side of this thing, which is that we've got a couple games in hand. The Pacific (Division) is wide open and we've got to win those hockey games."

• Dylan Strome provided the lone highlight for the Coyotes when he scored a cosmetic power-play goal at 13:02 of the third period. Strome has notched three goals this season, and all of them are power-play goals.
• The Coyotes have scored just seven goals over the past five games and are 1-3-1 in those games.
"I don't think that's the biggest issue," Ekman-Larsson said of the team's lack of offense. "I think, first of all, we've got to work hard enough and come out and be ready to play. I think that's what we need to focus on right now because the last three or four games we haven't been ready to go and that's something we need to realize."

• Stats that jump off the Event Summary: Clayton Keller took six shots on goal, Richard Panik delivered a season-high seven hits, and Alex Galchenyuk won eight of 11 face-offs.
• The Coyotes will play a rare home matinee on Sunday vs. Calgary. Look for Raanta to be back in the net.
"He needs to play," Tocchet said. "When you play a lot you stop some breakaways, and sometimes you don't, but he needs to play. This is not on him, but he needs to play. He's been out for eight games now so he needs to get in the lineup and play five, six, seven or eight games in a row here and get some kind of rhythm going."
• Actor Vince Vaughn, a hockey fan whose father lives in the Valley, dropped the ceremonial first puck before the game.