Colorado Avalanche Work on Specialty Plays at Practice

The Colorado Avalanche held a mandatory practice for the third time in four days. They used the practice to work on specialty plays.

The Colorado Avalanche held their final practice of a four-day stretch between games. They played the Chicago Blackhawks on Saturday, October 28, but will have had to wait until their November 2 game to carry over their success.

In that four-day span of time, the Avalanche have held one optional practice and three mandatory. Today they worked on some specialty plays.

Toward the end of practice, the Colorado Avalanche worked on shootout attempts — the team hasn’t gone into extra hockey in any of their games, but it was good times on the ice.

The most entertaining came from Mikko Rantanen:

Tyson Barrie was second up for Team Burgundy with his pretty much classic shootout move:

Personally, I liked the look of Team Blue’s shot from Nail Yakupov:

To my mind, Yakupov has some elite skating and puck handling skills. I think what holds him back is he doesn’t always have great ice vision.

The Colorado Avalanche also worked on their power play passing and shooting, though without defenders. Here’s unit one, which consisted of Nathan MacKinnon, Gabriel Landeskog, Matt Duchene, Tyson Barrie and Mikko Rantanen:

It’s pretty funny to see the puck go shooting past Duchene… until it happens in-game.

For some reason, the first power play strategy is pretty static and seems based on passing:

Unit two of the power play was a lot more dynamic:

That unit is comprised of Nail Yakupov, Carl Soderberg, Alexander Kerfoot, Sven Andrighetto and Erik Johnson, who is the main player cycling. Here’s their next attempt:

To be honest, I like the looks of this power play a lot more.

One thing that was good to see was that both. J.T. Compher and Gabriel Bourque were skating, albeit with red no-contact jerseys on. Bourque participated briefly in some early-practice activities, while Compher skated alone:

Bourque suffered a broken thumb on his shooting hand blocking a shot. However, he looks good handling his stick. The official word is he’s out “indefinitely,” but it’s expected he’ll be out a couple more weeks.

Neither Tyson Jost nor Colin Wilson was on the ice, which isn’t surprising. Wilson is out with a hip injury while Jost has a “lower body injury.”

Next: All About Barrie's 200th Point

The Colorado Avalanche host the Carolina Hurricanes tomorrow for the 12th game of the season.