Jared Bednar shakes things up in effort to wake his Avs up

A lot of change today with the Avalanche lineup, as they prepared on the practice ice for tomorrow’s New Year’s Eve home tilt with the Winnipeg Jets.

The top two lines look like this now:

Landeskog-MacKinnon-Donskoi

Burakovsky-Kadri-Rantanen

Oh, and the first power-play unit looks a lot different too. Taken off the top unit were Gabe Landeskog and Nazem Kadri, with Burakovsky and Donskoi put in their place.

Jared Bednar freely admitted that he’s growing impatient with the power play and it’s time to move some furniture around. Kadri has two goals in his last 10 games and, more alarmingly perhaps, only one power-play goal in his last 26 games.

Landeskog being dumped off the top unit was a bit more surprising to me, as he’s got three PP goals in his last eight games. One thing I know Bednar has been frustrated by on the PP, though, has been: Not enough shooting of the puck. Burakovsky loves to shoot, has a good shot, and Donskoi is effective around the net, like Landy is.

We’ll see how this works.

I talked with Kadri today about this and the team’s 2-4-1 mark in the last seven games, including three straight regulation home losses – all games in which they blew third-period leads.

“I think every team has these stretches in an 82-game season, but it’s something we’re definitely going to focus in on and get worked out,” Kadri said. “It’s a concern, but I don’t think it will be down the stretch.”

Over at the locker of Mikko Rantanen – who has seemed a little off lately – he talked about the need to get back to better defensive hockey as a five-man unit. A lot of offense can be created from better defense, he said.

“We’ve got to do the little things better again. We’re playing well at times, but for some reason we have had some slip-ups, especially with leads,” Rantanen said. “We have to be better against teams in our division too. We have a couple of big tests this week (Winnipeg and St. Louis) and they are good teams.”

Rantanen, who has only one goal and two points in the last five games, said there is nothing wrong with him physically.

“I feel great, but just having a little trouble finding the back of the net right now,” he said. “You can go through stretches like this in a season. Sometimes, it’s just harder and sometimes you might not play so good, but you get three points. I know I can be better though. We’ve lost too many games lately and we need to stop it.”