Compher At 1C?! New Avalanche Lines

Would you have thought that the Colorardo Avalanche would ever get to the point that J.T. Compher would be on the first-line playing center? Well, today it happened.

With the lack of offensive production as of late, there was a little mix up in the lines today. It is worthy to note that Compher has been dramatically improving on his faceoffs. Last night, Compher won 71.4 percent of his faceoffs. I had discussed that winning faceoffs were important before and Jared Bednar said that this was part of the reason Compher was moving up.

There was some obvious discussion about Pavel Francouz today. The Avalanche had an emergency backup in the second net for the whole practice. All Bednar said was, “Frankie is not feeling well,” and left it at that. The team will probably call up Jonas Johansson if Francouz continues to not feel well. Kurtis MacDermid was in a full contact sweater for the first time today, but has not been cleared yet.

Coach Interview

There was some frustration being shown by some of the power play skaters today so we asked the coach about the situation:

“Yeah, I think today, the ice wasn’t very good. Yeah. And you know, they’re hungry to try and score and we timed it today. So they had to work a little bit quicker and give the penalty kill a slight advantage. You know, so they don’t know how long it’s going. They can’t just slow it down. They have 30 seconds to go and try to create and move the puck a little quicker than probably what they want to so it’s kind of by design, pushing the pace of our power play a little bit,” he said.

This would explain why we saw Val Nichushkin and Mikko Rantanen slamming sticks. 

He was asked about how Sam Girard is playing and whether he feels he is being consistent:

“I would say no. Consistency in some games. I feel like he’s finding room and has been dangerous that way. Again, the shots through to the net need to improve gotta be able to help us a little bit more there. Skating abilities, still there but it’s a mindset you know, some games he has it, some shifts he has it, not quite as consistent as it was before though,” Bednar said.

Projected Lines

Forwards

Lehkonen- Compher-Rantanen

Nichushkin-Rodrigues-Newhook

Cogliano-Meyers-LOC

Hunt- Hudon- Foudy

Defensemen

Girard-Makar

Toews-EJ

Englund-MacDondald

MacDermid

Goalies

Georgiev

EBUG