Colorado Avalanche Complete 1st Week of Training Camp

The Colorado Avalanche completed four practices in their training camp for the first week of Phase 3 of the NHL’s response to the COVID-19 crisis.

The Colorado Avalanche completed four days’ worth of training camp starting Monday, July. They had 34 players, including goalies, at camp. They will not be able to take all the players into the bubble when they leave for the hub city on July 16.

Here are the players who attended camp:

There aren’t too many surprises of who was invited to camp. A notable absence is Martin Kaut. He has played nine NHL games, and one more game will complete the first year of his entry-level contract. Presumably, the team won’t use that game in the playoffs, so he didn’t come to camp.

Most if not all of the players who were at camp were also at the informal practices. However, these are the official practices.

On the first day, they were getting used to working on official drills again.

Day 2 saw more of the same. The Avalanche players started out pretty loose:

However, they quickly got down to business.

Day 3 occurred on Wednesday. The Avalanche worked on some drills — with props:

Here’s Tyson Jost showing some passion:

He also played with both groups:

The players also worked on faceoffs:

Day 4, Thursday, was the final day of the week, though they also practiced today, Saturday. The players participated in a scrimmage:

The lines and pairings seemed pretty set:

Burakovsky-MacKinnon-Rantanen

Landeskog-Kadri-Nichushkin

Compher-Namestnikov-Donskoi

Nieto-Bellemare-Calvert

Graves-Makar

Girard-Johnson

Zadorov-Cole

Finally, you’ll see by the line combinations I just outlined that Tyson Jost didn’t make the 12-man roster. He’s presumably the 13th forward.

I have no words. Because if I start with even one word, I’ll go off on a rant on that maskless fiend in the top right corner (how dare he risk the players with his carelessness!) and you can already see how that would go. So, no words.

The team will report to Edmonton to practice and eventually play in what’s hopefully a fixed Rogers Place. They will play an exhibition game against the Minnesota Wild on July 29 before starting their round robin on August 2.