Morning skate notebook: Joonas Donskoi feeling better

Hello from the Pepsi Center, where the Avalanche host the Pittsburgh Penguins tonight. For those hoping to see Sidney Crosby back in uniform tonight, you’ll be disappointed. He won’t play.

One of the big takeaways from this morning, for me, was Jared Bednar’s update on Joonas Donskoi. It seems like pretty good news.

Bednar said Donskoi is “feeling better” and that he even skated some this morning, on his own. He won’t play tonight, but the fact that he was on skates at all, so soon after taking that big hit from the Rangers’ Ryan Lindgren the other night, is real good news.

The other takeaway from the skate: Pavel Francouz in net. Now it begins: Whoever is playing best right now will get the next start, and vice-versa. This is a critical period for the Avs. They need to have a good homestand. Bednar is going to go with the lineup he thinks is best, and he basically said that the lineup he’s using tonight is the one he thinks “gives us the best chance to win the hockey game.”

These are your Avs lines and D pairs for the game:

Landeskog-MacKinnon-Rantanen

Burakovsky-Kadri-Nichushkin

Nieto-Bellemare-Calvert

Kamenev-Jost-Compher

Graves-Makar

Girard-Johnson

Cole-Zadorov

See you tonight. The Penguins probably will start Tristan Jarry in goal, but that is not official yet.