The Colorado Avalanche appear to have their opening night lineup set, but whether or not they do any tinkering beyond that remains to be seen.
On Sunday afternoon, the Avalanche practiced at Ball Arena, and we got a pretty clear idea of what their opening night lineup against the Los Angeles Kings will be…
Jonathan Drouin – Nathan MacKinnon – Mikko Rantanen
Artturi Lehkonen – Ryan Johansen – Valeri Nichushkin
Miles Wood – Ross Colton – Tomas Tatar
Andrew Cogliano – Fredrik Olofsson – Logan O’Connor
Devon Toews – Cale Makar
Bowen Byram – Josh Manson
Sam Girard – Jack Johnson
Not too bad, right?
There were two extras on the ice, with Kurtis MacDermid being the extra forward, and Sam Malinski on defense. The 25 year old defenseman was sent to the Colorado Eagles after practice, though.
In addition to demoting Malinski, the team sent Ben Meyers to the Eagles this morning. They also made a surprising move, waiving Riley Tufte. The 6’6″ forward scored three goals in the preseason, and appeared to lock down a roster spot, but that’s now in question.
Do the Avalanche have their 21 man roster set for opening night? According to Jared Bednar…maybe.
“We’ll see,” Bednar said after practice.
Several good players were waived on Saturday that could be intriguing pickups for the Avalanche, and if Tufte clears, Colorado will have a lot of flexibility to move players up and down throughout the year. I’d be surprised if they carried just 6 defensemen to start the year, but you never know.
Let’s get to the rest of news from practice…
I’ll take a look at some players that were waived today that might be of interest to the Avalanche either later today or tomorrow morning. There are certainly some defensemen that would make sense for them to claim, but there’s other factors that go into that. The team has to be cap complaint on Monday afternoon.
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