The Avalanche have an opportunity to break out of a nearly three-week-old slump and move back into second place in the Central Division when they play Dallas at the Pepsi Center on Tuesday.

They trail the Stars by one point (56-55) and have a slight edge in regulation/overtime wins (25-24), which is the first tiebreaker for playoff seeding, as well as for earning a postseason berth if it comes to that.

The Avalanche played Dallas twice in early November and lost both games, 2-1 at home and 4-1 at the American Airlines Center. They lost to the Stars a third time, 3-2 in a shootout, last month in Dallas.

They’ve gone 14-11-2 against Western Conference teams, just 7-8-1 against division opponents.

“Our record is not good enough against those guys,” Mikko Rantanen said after practice Monday. “This is a big one for sure. We have to find a way to get two points.”

The Avalanche are in a 3-6-2 slide that includes a 1-4-1 record at home. Making matters worse, they either had a lead or were tied at some point in the third period in all five of the home losses, most recently on Friday in a 4-3 overtime loss to Pittsburgh.

“It’s happened too many times already,” Rantanen said. “I think it’s in our heads, it’s more mental. We know everybody can play, we know we can defend a lead; we’ve done it before, we did it last year in playoffs, we’ve done it many times.

“Now, we get a lead and we go to the third and somehow we just blew the leads. We give up some easy goals and did some mistakes. Obviously, there is some thought in our mind when we’re leading; we give up one and I don’t know if we stop playing. We’ve talked about it these last three days. We have to play aggressive. If we stay back, we’re going to blow the lead, and that’s what happened.

“We don’t want to go through what we did last year. We went through a long stretch, two months almost we couldn’t find a way. I have no doubt in my mind that we’re going to turn it around. It takes a commitment from all the guys to do it the right way.”

The Avalanche went 7-18-6 from Dec. 4 through Feb. 16 last season, then went 5-0-1 and 2-5-0 before going on an 8-0-2 run to clinch a playoff spot in the 81st game of the season.

The goal this year has been to gain home ice in the playoffs, and there are 37 games remaining to do it.

“We’re trying to make sure we’re not making the same mistakes that are costing us hockey games, which has kind of popped up a little bit here lately with our rush coverage,” coach Jared Bednar said. “We’re working on it, we’ve addressed it, we’ll be better at it, and now we’ve got to go find a way to improve a little bit on the offensive side of things, 5-on-5, both as individuals and as a team. We were working on that today.”

It hasn’t helped that the goaltending has regressed during this slide. Philipp Grubauer and Pavel Francouz have made some big saves at times, but they've also allowed too many soft goals.

“I would say recently their play hasn’t been as good, but it’s no different than any other player or our team as a whole recently,” Bednar said. “One of the ways you get out of a little funk like we’re in is to get some great individual performances, and that will start with our goaltending.

"And we need better from certain guys up front and certain guys on the D-corps. We have to try to put together a full game of good performances and break out of this thing and move on from there and try to repeat it.”

Bednar said forward Joonas Donskoi, who is going through concussion protocol, skated 30-plus minutes before practice Monday after skating 20-plus minutes Sunday.

“Hopefully he’s on the road to recovery sooner than later,” he said.

Andre Burakovsky was ill and didn’t practice.



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