Morning skate notebook: Avs make lineup changes

Greetings from the Pepsi Center, where tonight the Avalanche try to keep this thing rollin’, with what is sure to be a tough matchup against the Los Angeles Kings. Puck drop is at 7:08.

Some lineup changes in store for tonight. They are:

Duncan Siemens in, David Warsofsky out on defense. I think Jared Bednar wants as big and physical a lineup as he can get against the big, physical Kings, so ergo the change there.

Vladislav Kamenev is back in the lineup, at fourth-line center. He’ll replace Dominic Toninato. Also, Carl Soderberg will miss another game with an unspecified illness.

That’s a tough loss for the Avs, because Soderberg has the kind of big body that can hang effectively against the Kings’ top center, Anze Kopitar. I think Bednar was counting on that matchup, having the last change and all, but he’s just too sick to go yet.

Jonathan Bernier is back too. He’ll be the backup for Semyon Varlamov, with Spencer Martin still on the roster – but expected to be sent back to San Antonio soon. Bernier will wear a new helmet, by the way. It’ll be a bigger, more padded one – a “concussion helmet.”

He’s had two concussions in less than a month, so it obviously makes sense. Bernier said, after the last one, he was “seeing spots” and things were too “black and white” right after taking that slap shot off the facemask from Oliver Ekman-Larsson.

I’ll post some locker-room audio here soon.