Injuries push Erik Johnson into lineup sooner than expected

The Avalanche made it through two whole games before the injury woes of last year began to descend upon them again. With what sounds like very minor injuries for the moment to Pavel Francouz and Andre Burakovsky, the lineup tonight against the Los Angeles Kings is getting some tweaks.

With Burakovsky out, the team is running 11 forwards and seven defensemen with Erik Johnson set to make his season debut. Johnson missed the first two games after testing positive for COVID-19 before training camp.

That missed time was supposed to mean a slow road back for Johnson as he just practiced for the first time with the team on Sunday. Instead, he’s slotting in as the lone man on the back end without a partner.

The rest of the pairings are set to stay the same from last week’s 8-0 domination of the St. Louis Blues. Changes upfront are necessary, however, as Burakovsky is out with an upper-body injury that Bednar said was something nagging at him and he could be available for the rematch with the Kings on Thursday night.

With Burakovsky out, the plan is essentially to just bump guys up one spot. Here’s how it should look:

Landeskog-MacKinnon-Rantanen
Saad-Kadri-Donskoi
Jost-Compher-Nichushkin
Bellemare-Calvert

Toews-Makar
Graves-Girard
Cole-Timmins
Johnson

Grubauer
Miska

The injury to Francouz is a lower-body injury that, like Burakovsky, Bednar said could end up causing him to miss just tonight’s contest. Francouz’s injury could be costlier on this road trip as the Avs are set to play their first back-to-back this week and that was set to be Francouz’s season debut.

If he can’t go, Hunter Miska will get his first NHL start later this week.

It’s not quite the injurypalooza we saw last season but it’s hard to convince anyone in Avs land after that fiasco that this isn’t the start of something similar.

Nazem Kadri and Ryan Graves briefly spoke with media following practice and the big takeaways were that Graves is reading a book that appears to be titled “Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice” and that Kadri brought Monopoly for some old-school board game action fun.

For those curious, the Avs’ decision to run with seven D on the roster and being forced to add Miska as the third goaltender chewed through their available salary cap space, meaning they could not promote a 12th forward from the taxi squad without removing someone from the roster (in this case it would have to be Timmins).

We’ve talked a bit about the cap games the Avs have to play

On the other side of the ice, the Kings are getting season debuts from forwards Carl Grundstrom and Lias Andersson while slotting Cal Petersen in net for his first start of the year.