GLENDALE, Ariz. — Last season, Matt Duchene had only one goal in the Avalanche’s first 11 games and the “what’s-wrong-with-Duchene” questions and stories came in flurries. That was before he had a torrid November, scoring 11 goals in the month, and he was on the way to the first 30-goal season of his career.
This season, he’s off to a little better start.
Duchene scored twice Saturday, giving him five in the Avalanche’s first seven games, and veteran winger Rene Bourque added his first goal for Colorado as the Avalanche beat the Arizona Coyotes 3-2 at Gila River Arena.
Calvin Pickard had 24 saves in his second start of 2016-17 and the Avalanche snapped its losing streak at two, 24 hours after a desultory 1-0 loss at home to the Winnipeg Jets.
Arizona was 0-for-4 on the power play, and after struggling early in the season, Colorado’s penalty kill is 15-for-16 in the past four games. Carl Soderberg and Blake Comeau did much of the PK work at forward, while Erik Johnson and Nikita Zadorov were on for the majority of the short-handed time on defense.
“We needed this one,” Duchene said of the Avalanche, now 4-3 for the season. “We didn’t want to sink below .500.”
Pickard’s previous start was a 4-3 overtime win at Pittsburgh on Oct. 17.
“This was a big win for us,” Pickard said. “We did a lot of good things (against Winnipeg Friday), but we wanted to come out and play a good 60 minutes. We definitely did that. All the way through, we were the better team.”
Bourque, who made the Avalanche on a professional tryout at training camp and signed a one-year, $635,000 contract, broke a 1-1 tie on a power play at 1:42 of the third period, when a Nathan MacKinnon shot caromed off the end boards to Bourque in front, and his shot got past Arizona goalie Louis Domingue.
“I just turned around and the puck was right there,” said Bourque. “I was very fortunate. I knew Mac was coming off the half-wall and he shot it, and it got blocked, and it came right off the end boards and I turned around to face the goalie and found that it was right there. So all I had to do was put it in. I’ll take anything.”
Bourque had 151 goals in 660 NHL games coming into this season, but he had only three with Columbus last season in 49 games as he finished up the six-year, $20-million contract extension he signed with Calgary in 2010. With Colorado, he had missed the final two games of the recent four-game road trip with a groin injury, but returned to the lineup against Winnipeg on Friday.
Coyotes winger Radim Vrbata, who began his career with the Avalanche from 2001-03, opened opened the scoring at 14:57 of the first period. Johnson caught up ice as the play went the other way and Vrbata finished off the odd-man rush, beating Pickard to the stick side from the slot off a drop pass from Max Domi.
Duchene tied it up and ended a Colorado scoreless stretch at 100 minutes, 14 seconds with his fourth goal of the season at 5:51 of the second period. Mikhail Grigorenko backhanded a pass from behind the net to Duchene in front, and Duchene’s backhander beat Domingue.
“Great play by Grigo,” said Duchene. “It started when Gabe (Landeskog) kind of muled the puck up the ice and drew two guys to him and was able to poke it to me in the middle to create that rush for us. Two great plays by them and I was just kind of able to make a play there.”
Actually, the Avalanche hadn’t scored in a week, or since Duchene’s goal at 5:37 of the third period in a 5-2 loss at Florida on Oct. 22. But Colorado’s only other game since then was the loss to Winnipeg.
Bourque’s power-play goal came with the Coyotes’ Jordan Martinook off for tripping Duchene, and then Duchene gave the Avalanche breathing room when his shot from the top of the right circle went off Domingue’s glove and in. “That was another unbelievable play by Gabe,” Duchene said. “I didn’t even see the puck coming and it landed right on my stick. And then I just tried to get a quick, hard shot off and it found its way in.”
Coyotes winger Tobias Rieder found himself sprung behind the Colorado defense and scored at 15:56 of the third, beating Pickard to the glove side, to make it 3-2.
“Those things happen,” said Pickard. “The guy a good shot off, it was 3-2, and we had to regroup. But we never had the feeling that we were going to lose it. We all felt confident in what we were doing our there. Those last four minutes were tense, but we definitely did the job.”
Duchene said, “‘Picks’ shut the door and played great.”
And the Avalanche held on, while the Coyotes — coming off a six-game road trip — dropped to 2-6.
“He was good tonight,” Avalanche coach Jared Bednar said of Duchene. “He was hard on pucks, strong on pucks, kept his feet moving down low, and then he made some plays and ended up scoring a couple of goals.”
Bednar noted the breakdowns on the two Arizona goals. “You know what? Neutral-zone, faceoff forecheck,” Bednar said. “They got two off of it. We made a couple of mistakes there. Actually, we made more than a couple. They capitalized on a couple.”
This was a one-game trip for Colorado, which next faces the Nashville Predators on Tuesday at the Pepsi Center.
