Colorado Avalanche Center Matt Duchene Must Score in Next 3 Games

In order to avoid having a painful goal scoring drought, center Matt Duchene must score soon for the Colorado Avalanche.

Colorado Avalanche center Matt Duchene started out hot this season. He scored the first goal of the Avalanche’s regular season against the New York Rangers. He scored two more goals in the next five games. However, he’s been relegated to assists only for the last five games with no points at all in the last two.

Duchene went from being first to fourth on the team for scoring.

Two games without a point or even five games without a goal isn’t anything to panic about. However, Matt Duchene has ever been a streaky scorer:

During the golden 2013-14 season, Duchene had a nine-game goal drought.
Earlier that season he had a career-high 13-game goal drought.
During the 2014-15 season he had a 12-game goal drought.
During the 2016-17 season Duchene had a 11-game goal drought that also saw him go pointless.

More from Mile High Sticking

There’s no question Duchene will have a goal drought this year. However, for his and his fans’ sakes we don’t want it to start so early on. Because any aberration in Duchene’s on-ice production and off-ice demeanor will spark the dreaded

trade

rumors again. And when Duchene is in one of his goal scoring droughts, he can’t help but be a little tight off the ice — it’s just the nature of the man.

The Colorado Avalanche have three games coming up until they have four days off in preparation of playing in Sweden and four days off following their Swedish trip. Those three games are all against Eastern Conference teams:

Nov. 2: vs Carolina Hurricanes
Nov 4: at Philadelphia Flyers
Nov. 5: at New York Islanders

Matt Duchene needs to score in at least one of those games — preferably right against the Hurricanes. Ideally, he’d score a couple goals and earn a couple assists in that stretch of games.

Unfortunately, coach Jared Bednar isn’t making it too easy on him. For the first seven games of the season, Duchene had consistent linemates in Alexander Kerfoot and Nail Yakupov.

However, Bednar decided to move Kerfoot to his natural center position on a line with Gabriel Landeskog and J.T. Compher against the Blues. Sven Andrighetto joined Duchene and Yakupov for one game. The next game saw Landeskog join Duchene and Yakupov. He stayed for two games.

By the game against the Chicago Blackhawks, Duchene was centering Sven Andrighetto and Rocco Grimaldi. This is not an ideal situation to get Duchene scoring.

Duchene has always been known as a high strung man. He’s a player who openly admits to seeing a sports psychologist because he gets in his head too much. He came into this season with those stupid “demanding a trade” rumors swirling around his head.

If Duchene endures another one of his goal-scoring droughts right now, the media are going to start asking him about it like they always do. However, now they’ll add that trade piece to the mix.

I don’t know about you, Avs Nation, but I’m sick unto death of that speculation. He gets traded, he doesn’t get traded, whatever. Neither he nor his fans can control that.

MORE ABOUT MATT DUCHENE

That’s why we and the Colorado Avalanche need to see Matt Duchene score a goal in the next three games. Plus, you know, the Avs often win when he does it.

Home/Editorials