The Avalanche on Saturday assigned defenseman Nikita Zadorov to San Antonio of the AHL, leaving center Mikhail Grigorenko as the lone roster player left from the offseason trade that sent Ryan O'Reilly and Jamie McGinn to Buffalo.
(The Avalanche also acquired forward J.T. Compher, 20, team captain at University of Michigan, from the Sabres; and the No. 31 pick in the 2015 draft, which was traded to San Jose for the No. 39 pick (left wing A.J. Greer, 18, Boston University), a second-round pick in 2016 and sixth-round pick in 2017).
Zadorov, 20, played in the first 10 games but was a healthy scratch for three of the past four games. He was minus-3 Thursday with a turnover that led to a goal in the Avalanche's 4-2 loss in Arizona.
Overall, the 6-foot-5, 220-pounder played in 11 games with two assists, seven shots, eight penalty minutes, 34 hits, nine blocked shots and a minus-5 rating while averaging 16:08 in ice time.
Zadorov is better off with the 5-0-3-0 Rampage, where he'll play a ton, than with the Avalanche if he's only going to play once every few games. You can only learn so much in practice and, frankly, it might do him some good to be play for a winning minor-league team rather than picking up bad habits while trying to force things with an Avalanche team that is struggling so much.
GM Joe Sakic told the Denver Post that he doesn't expect to call up a replacement defenseman, leaving the Avalanche with seven.
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Sakic told the Post that Alex Tanguay's knee injury will prevent him from playing for "an extended" period. He was injured on a hit by New York's Oscar Lindberg late in the second period of the Avalanche's 2-1 loss. Lindberg was assessed a tripping penalty on the play. Tanguay took one brief shift in the third period and didn't return.
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Nathan MacKinnon had another impressive performance Friday despite playing with a sore right hand.
He scored the only goal with a couple of nice moves early in the first period and had a team-high six shots in 22:51. He only took two faceoffs, one each in the second and third periods.
"It's a little sore, but I'm all right," he said. "It was pretty painful (after getting hit in Thursday's game), more of a stinger. It's all right, I'll be OK."
MacKinnon is more concerned about the Avalanche's 4-9-1 record with the monster seven-game road trip on the horizon. They open it Tuesday in Philadelphia and won't play another home game until Nov. 25 against Ottawa.
"It's tough to feel good about what you're doing when the team isn't winning," said MacKinnon, who has two goals and three assists in a three-game scoring streak and leads the Avalanche with 15 points (six goals, nine assists) and a plus-4 plus/minus rating. "I need to be better if the team is going to get some more wins. Six shots, I need to score more than one (goal). We need to win some hockey games."
As for the Avalanche's inability to win one-goal games (they have a 1-6-1 record):
"It's tough, it seems like there's been about a hundred of them," MacKinnon said. "We've only played 14 games and it seems like we've been part of a lot of one-goal losses. We need to find a way to win those to get back in the mix."
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Matt Duchene on the failure to come up with big goals to eliminate all the close defeats:
"Way too many and we haven't come out on the right side of many of them at all. That's the frustrating part; we're not a bad hockey team. We're in every single game. We've been blown out once, against Boston. That was the only game of the whole season we weren't in. When you're that close to winning so many times it's frustrating.
"It’s tough right now. We have to go over .500 on that road trip, there’s no doubt about that. We almost have to fight for our lives every day right now. As funny as it sounds so early in the season, it’s the truth.…
Coach Patrick Roy: "It's a very, very frustrating start to the season. We need to find a way to push those (one-goal games) to overtime, we need to find a way to get that big goal in the third period. We just don't have the confidence around the net right now that could make the difference."