Avs practice notebook: No Cale Makar at practice, but nothing serious it seems

A bit of a scare at Avalanche practice today. Cale Makar was not a participant. Conor Timmins took his spot on the first power-play unit, and after practice Timmins and PP coach Ray Bennett went over a lot of diagramming on a whiteboard.

The Avs said any update on Makar would have to wait until Jared Bednar spoke with the media and…you can exhale.

Bednar said Makar has a “little tweak” somewhere (didn’t specify), but that it was just a “maintenance day” and that Makar should be good to go for the season-opener Thursday night against Calgary.

Makar did some rehab work over the summer on some kind of lower-body issue. You hope there isn’t some kind of recurring thing, but that’s just me being Mr. Worrywort.

Timmins was asked if he would be “ready” to play on the first PP unit if called upon Thursday, and said he is and would be confident out there. At the time of this writing, the Avs still needed to make three more cuts to get down to the 23-man roster, due this afternoon. Timmins still didn’t know if he’d made the club or not, but that he “wants to stay here, on this roster.”

After meeting with the media, Bednar said he would soon visit with GM Joe Sakic and determine the final roster cuts. We will know soon. I’m not going to make any hard and fast predictions, but it would seem that Jayson Megna is likely to be one of them, because he wasn’t on one of the four lines at practice. Then again, neither was Vladislav Kamenev.

We’ll know soon.

The four lines today were:

Landeskog-MacKinnon-Rantanen

Jost-Kadri-Burakovsky

Nieto-Compher-Donskoi

Calvert-Bellemare-Nichushkin

Thoughts: I had thought Donskoi had that second-line right-wing job, but no. Looks like Bednar is going to go with Burakovsky. Probably because Donskoi can be a more versatile, two-way, third-liner kind of guy. But I know Donskoi wants to prove he can be a top-6 guy…It’s looking more and more like Nichushkin has made the club. We’ll know soon.