There won't be any lineup changes for the Avalanche on Saturday night when they meet Dallas at the Pepsi Center.
But they are determined to change how they handle the third period if they happen to take a lead after turning a 4-1 third-period lead Thursday into a 5-4 loss to Minnesota.
Here are the
game notes.
"There's not much more of a heartbreaking loss than what we had the other night, but we totally outplayed them for most of the game,"
Matt Duchene said Saturday morning. "It was a bad lapse at the end, and that's something we will avoid next time. It's a good thing for us to learn right away. We just made some bad errors at times. I made a couple errors defensively, but give them credit, they converted on them.
"There's still a lot of positives to take away from that game, that's what we have to choose to focus on. We can't dwell on the negative because if we do we won't come out the way we need to. We're not far off."
Avalanche coach
Patrick Roy accentuated the positive in meetings the past two days, emphasizing the things the Avalanche did well.
"I am very curious to see how we're going to play when we step on the ice at the start of the game," Roy said. "We did so many good things out there. The first 45 (minutes) were really good. We were sharp on the loose pucks, we were moving our feet, and that's what I wanted to show the guys. We also know we have to manage our game better. If we could go through a period of five minutes like we did the other day, now we know what we have to do.
"We need to bounce back, we can't feel sorry for ourselves. We need to remain even keel."
The Stars come in on the heels of a 3-0 win against Pittsburgh on Thursday. New goalie
Antti Niemi, who made 37 saves for his 33rd NHL shutout, has a 8-1-3 career record against the Avalanche with a 2.54 goals-against average and .910 save percentage.
Dallas also added forward
Patrick Sharp and defenseman
Johnny Oduya from Chicago. Sharp, a four-time 30-goal scorer, won the Stanley Cup three times with the Blackhawks and Oduya did it twice.
"They're a very offensive team and we always have good games with them," Duchene said. "We have four days until our next game (Wednesday against Boston) and you don't want them to be negative, you want to be feeling good going into those four days. We beat ourselves last game. If we get a lead (Saturday), we'll close it out."
The Avalanche won all five games against the Stars last season and have gone 9-1-0 against them the past two seasons. Avalanche goalie
Semyon Varlamov has a 9-3-2 career record against them with a 2.99 average and .907 save percentage
"We haven't had a lot of luck and we need to change that," Stars coach
Lindy Ruff said. "They're a dynamic team on the rush, they've got some dynamic players that can do some damage on the rush. We've played some loose hockey and some really good hockey and haven't been rewarded for it. It's really getting that 60 minutes where we can win a tight game from them."
Here are the lineups:
STARS
Jamie Benn -- Cody Eakin -- Tyler Seguin
Valeri Nichushkin -- Jason Spezza -- Patrick Sharp
Antoine Roussel -- Mattias Janmark -- Ales Hemsky
Travis Moen -- Vernon Fiddler -- Patrick Eaves
Alex Goligoski -- John Klingberg
Johnny Oduya -- Jason Demers
Jyrki Jokipakka -- Jordie Benn
Antti Niemi
Kari Lehtonen
AVALANCHE
Blake Comeau -- Matt Duchene -- Jarome Iginla
Gabriel Landeskog -- Nathan MacKinnon -- Alex Tanguay
Mikko Rantanen -- Carl Soderberg -- Borna Rendulic
Cody McLeod -- John Mitchell -- Jack Skille
Francois Beauchemin -- Erik Johnson
Nate Guenin -- Tyson Barrie
Nikita Zadorov -- Nick Holden
Semyon Varlamov
Reto Berra
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