An Avalanche road trip that began with such promise has gone south with two difficult games remaining: Saturday in Washington and Monday in Winnipeg.
After winning the first three games of the seven-game excursion, they've lost two in a row, most recently on Thursday with a 4-3 loss in Pittsburgh.
The Avalanche grabbed a 1-0 lead and the momentum on Matt Duchene's goal with under a minute left in the first period, but they gave it back when the Penguins scored three times in a 2:08 span of the second period.
Whether or not Francois Beauchemin deserved a high-sticking penalty against Matt Cullen to negate a Colorado power play and create a 4-on-4 situation, the Avalanche didn't respond well at all after the Penguins scored a fluke goal to tie the game. Ian Cole took a shot that hit David Perron in the back and bounced behind goalie Reto Berra.
Two more goals followed. Evgeni Malkin smoked a shot past Berra on the ensuing power play, and Berra didn't control the puck when he went behind the net moments later. Where was the communication on this play? Chris Kunitz gained possession, fed Nick Bonino for a shot and put in the rebound as Berra scrambled to get into position.
The Avalanche too often wilt after a bad break or two, just as they did last season. It happened again after Tyson Barrie closed the deficit to 3-2 in the third period with his first goal of the season. Sidney Crosby got that one back three minutes later to regain Pittsburgh's two-goal lead.
Duchene scored again with Berra off for a sixth skater, but Penguins goalie Marc-Andre Fleury prevented Jarome Iginla from tying the game with a big stop with less than a second left in the game.
"We have to find ways to win those hockey games," coach Patrick Roy told the Denver Post after the game. "That's the thing we should be concerned about."
Roy said he won't break up the Gabriel Landeskog-Nathan MacKinnon-Duchene line to try and spread the scoring around, even though the other lines aren't contributing much of anything at the offensive end.
"It's the other lines' job to find ways to compete," Roy said.
At the very least replace Blake Comeau on the second line with Mikhail Grigorenko. It's worth a try.
Duchene has at least one point in each of the first five games of the trip, with six goals and five assists. He leads the Avalanche with 10 goals and passed Mats Sundin into 11th place on the franchise list for points (335) and into 12th place for goals (136). He has nine goals in November, one shy of Claude Lemieux's team record for the month he set in 1995-96.
Roy was non-committal after the game regarding the goalie situation for Saturday, and the Avalanche didn't practice Friday. Semyon Varlamov has missed six games with a groin injury but has been practicing this week, apparently without pain. He has a 2-1-0 record in three games against his former Capitals teammates with a 1.35 goals-against average.
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Here's an interesting New York Post story on Travis Hamonic on why he wants the New York Islanders to trade him.
The 6-2, 205-pound defenseman wants to play for a team closer to his home in Manitoba for personal reasons, which the Islanders were aware of before the season. Western Canada teams have the edge, though Colorado could be an option. But the Islanders will want plenty in return for Hamonic, a second-round pick (No. 53) in the 2008 NHL draft.
A right hand shot, Hamonic, 25, is in the third year of a seven-year contract with a salary cap hit of $3.857 million, according to war-on-ice.com.