Avs morning skate notebook: Varlamov hurt

Greetings from the Pepsi Center, where the Avalanche will try to get back into the winning column against a San Jose Sharks team coming off an 8-5 loss in Calgary.

The news from the morning skate: Semyon Varlamov is hurt again.

The Avs say it is only a day-to-day situation, but it is a lower-body injury and Pavel Francouz is the backup tonight to Philipp Grubauer. Just have to hope for the best with Varly, who has had his share of lower-body (knee, hips, groin) injuries before. He was run into the last game, including once by his own teammate, Erik Johnson, so it could be from that.

There are no other lineup changes from the previous game.

Your lines are as follows:

Jost-MacKinnon-Rantanen

Landeskog-Kerfoot-Compher

Nieto-Soderberg-Calvert

Bourque-Dries-O’Connor

D

Girard-Johnson

Cole-Barrie

Nemeth-Graves

Grubauer

The Avs and Jared Bednar know the house is on fire a little bit right now and they need to extinguish this thing pronto. San Jose figures to be very mad coming in, after that last loss, so I’m anticipating a tough opponent. Plus, Erik Karlsson is on fire right now himself, with points in his last 10 games.

On the other injury front, looks like Colin Wilson will be back very soon. Bednar said he’s doing very well, so we’ll see about Friday night maybe. He won’t play tonight. I didn’t see Nikita Zadorov out there this morning, though, and the Avs aren’t saying much different about him, other than it’s kind of a day-to-day thing I guess – though a Friday return would seem unlikely at this point.