The injury situation for the Colorado Avalanche’s top six forwards went from bad to worse over a week ago when Nazem Kadri went down with an upper-body injury. While the team did expect Kadri to be healthy before the Stanley Cup Playoffs, Colorado Hockey Now’s Adrian Dater reports that he could be back well before then, potentially returning to the lineup within the next week. Kadri actually still leads the Avalanche with 83 points, a mark he’s held as Nathan MacKinnon and Gabriel Landeskog have both missed significant time with injuries this year. The team’s actually only played three games without Kadri, as a sparse schedule over the past week and a half has done them favors. J.T. Compher has filled in Kadri’s spot, registering two points in three games (both came against Pittsburgh on April 5th). With Colorado having a stranglehold on the Western Conference regular-season title, the Avalanche hope to get Kadri back in order to continue building chemistry among their new acquisitions as the playoffs near.
A couple of other hockey-related notes:
- With Logan Brown expected to draw into the St. Louis Blues lineup again tonight, the Blues will no longer receive the conditional fourth-round pick sent to them by the Ottawa Senators in the trade in which they acquired him. The pick, slated to be Ottawa’s 2022 fourth-round selection, is retained by Ottawa if Brown plays in 30 regular-season games this season, which is the mark he’ll hit tonight. The trade will rest as a one-for-one swap for Brown and Zach Sanford, who the Senators flipped to the Winnipeg Jets at this year’s Trade Deadline for a 2022 fifth-round pick. The Blues remain with their own 2022 fourth-round pick.
- There’s coaching news regarding a Big Ten school, but maybe not the one some have been bracing for. Michigan State University announced today that the team has parted ways with head coach Danton Cole, who’d been behind the bench for five seasons with a record of 58-101-12. The team failed to make the NCAA Division I Men’s Ice Hockey Tournament under his tenure, and they haven’t been there since 2012. They’ve only made the tournament twice after winning the national championship in 2007, led by future NHLers Justin Abdelkader, Tim Kennedy, and Chris Mueller.
Would love to see Michigan State get a new look… too storied a program to not have good results for this long. Many of the smaller Michigan schools have surpassed them. If you’d asked me 10 years ago if western, Ferris and tech would produce more consistent wins, compared to msu I wouldn’t have believed it.
Agree! I hope they do a deep dive and really do some work in hiring a new coach. With the facilities and history they have at MSU there is no reason for them to have such a crap hockey team. I sure hope they get it right!
**Rantenen leads the Avalanche in points** – not “Kadri actually still leads the Avalanche with 83 points”….
They need to turn it around. A great program that has fallen on bad times. They used to be in the mix with University of Michigan.