Calvin Pickard will start in goal Monday in Pittsburgh when the Avalanche begin a four-game road trip that includes games in Washington on Tuesday, Tampa Bay on Thursday and Florida on Saturday.
Semyon Varlamov will start against the Capitals. He had 23 saves Saturday in the Avalanche's wild 6-5 season-opening win against Dallas at the Pepsi Center before a sellout crowd of 18,007.
Coach Jared Bednar picked up his first NHL win, Joe Colborne collected his first career hat trick, and Tyson Barrie and Nathan MacKinnon each had a goal and an assist.
Colborne, who signed as a free agent on July 1, became the second player in Avalanche/Quebec Nordiques history to record a hat trick in his team debut. Real Cloutier did it against Atlanta on Oct. 10, 1979.
Here's my NHL.com GAME STORY. You'll notice the new format, which includes several videos.
"Last night was a fun night," Bednar said after practice Sunday morning. "I went out with my family after and had a bite to eat. Then a short turnaround for this morning's practice with us flying out, so I tried to get a little rest and get ready to go on the road."
Bednar said that most of the Avalanche defensive problems took place in the neutral zone or offensive end of the ice.
"It’s all correctable," he said. "We worked on that a little bit today. The mistakes that I felt cost us were up ice. So you saw today we worked on our forecheck and our neutral zone forecheck just to make sure that we’re not having any breakdowns out there that lead to odd-man rushes against because that’s where I thought we got hurt a little bit last night.…
The Avalanche outshot the Stars 33-28 and owned a 62-54 advantage including blocked and missed shots.
As for the road trip, Bednar said: "It's a big test for us, the first time we're going out as a group. We're playing some of the best teams out East. Our goal is we expect to win every night."
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"The win was huge," said defenseman Francois Beauchemin, who had two assists, was plus-one and blocked three shots in a team-high 23:18 of ice time while wearing an 'A' as an alternate captain. He also helped to kill off Blake Comeau's late slashing penalty, which began with 1:56 remaining in regulation.
"We don't want to give up five goals every game, but at least we did a lot of good things offensively," Beauchemin said. "I think a lot of the goals we gave up was us doing the wrong things. It's not what they did, it's more us.
"We were a few days late into the season and the first one's out of the way and we got a big win out of it. Now we go on the road for four (games). We have a tough road trip coming up. They're all good playoff teams from last year and it's going to be a good challenge. I think we have the capability of facing it."
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Bednar said Rene Bourque was "a little sore," which is why he didn't practice Sunday.
John Mitchell (hip) didn't practice all week and didn't go on the trip.