UPDATE: The Avalanche has returned Duncan Siemens, Rocco Grimaldi and Anton Lindholm to San Antonio, and they will not play for Colorado Sunday at St. Louis. The Rampage has four games remaining: Sunday at home against Bakersfield, Wednesday at Texas, Friday at home against Texas, and then Saturday at Texas again.
DALLAS — Defenseman Duncan Siemens was the second of Colorado’s first-round draft choices in 2011, going at No. 11 overall — nine choices behind . Six years later, Siemens is getting a final-week cameo with Colorado after his recall from the San Antonio Rampage.
His third game with the Avs was their 4-3 shootout loss to the on Saturday at the American Airlines Center, and Colorado will take a 22-55-4 record into the season finale Sunday at St. Louis.
After falling behind 2-0 in the first minute of the second period, the Avalanche stormed back on goals from , Gabe Landeskog and to take a 3-2 lead, but ultimately fell in the shootout. , MacKinnon and Rantanen all failed to beat Dallas goalie Kari Lehtonen, and Tyler Seguin’s score on Jeremy Smith on the first of the Stars’ two attempts was enough to pull out the win in Dallas’ final game of the season.
Smith, who faced 18 shots in the first period — the scoreboard originally had the Stars for 20 shots — and kept it from getting out of hand early. He finished with 42 saves.
The Avalanche has been trying to provide previews of its offseason reboot with other recent moves, but Siemen’s promotion likely is more of a final trial.
Siemens, 23, is on a one-year contract that followed his three-year entry level deal, and now he seems to have been stamped as an AHL journeyman rather than as a prospect — despite the expectations-raising No. 11 slot.
Except for a final-game cup of coffee with the Avalanche at the end of the 2014-15 season, and now this stint, Siemens has spent four seasons with Colorado’s AHL affliates, the Lake Erie Monsters and then the Rampage. In the second half of the Rampage season, the top pairing was Sergei Boikov and Anton Lindholm, who joined the Avalanche in mid-March.
“I’m just happy to be here right now,” Siemens said before playing in a pairing with against the Stars. “I wanted to be here earlier, but you have to earn your opportunities, and I’m happy that I’m getting one now and I’m just trying to make the best of it.
BOXSCORE:
“Last summer, I thought there was going to be a good opportunity here. I thought I had a good training camp and I went down to the American League and have been able to put together a fairly successful season there on a personal level. Ultimately, it got me back to where I want to be. I just want to take advantage of every opportunity I get right now, and see what the summer throws at me.”
Injuries llimited Siemens to no more than 54 games in each of his first three AHL seasons. But he had played in all 69 Rampage games when recalled. “I think that held my development back quite a bit,” he said of the injuries. “I managed to stay healthy this year and play fairly consistent down there.”
Siemens logged 15:23 of ice time and was a minus-1 against the Stars. In three games, he doesn’t have a point and is a minus-2. Colorado was playing with pairings of Siemens-Beauchemin, Mark Barberio-Erik Johnson and Tyson Barrie-Lindholm.
“I thought he’s been pretty good the last couple of games,” Colorado coach Jared Bednar said of Siemens before the game. “Simple play, steady defender, limiting his mistakes. I thought he’s been doing a nice job, he’s using his first option to get the puck out of the zone, nothing fancy. He gets it to the first available guy to getting us going in the right direction. . . One thing he also has is an edge to his game, a physical guy that’s got some toughness to him. If he incorporates that into his game, it makes him even more valuable.”
From the blue line, Barrie had two assists against the Stars and it was a bit hard to follow because two of the three goals underwent scoring changes, including after the game, when a goal originally credited to MacKinnon and switched to Barrie was switched back to MacKinnon.
The Stars — also not bound for the playoffs — pulled into the 3-3 tie at 13:44 of the third period on Tyler Seguin’s 26th goal of the season, then won in the shootout after an apparent John Klingberg goal in overtime was disallowed after a video review determined Dallas was offside.
“The first period, we didn’t play well at all,” Bednar said. “I thought Smitty did a real good job of keeping us in that game, obviously. We started to gain a little traction as the game went on and I didn’t mind the way we played for most of the second and third. We scratched and fought our way back in.”
Footnotes. The Avalanche scratches were Joe Colborne, Patrick Wiercioch, Fedor Tyutin, John Mitchell, Cody Goloubef and Mikhail Grigorenko … Rantanen’s 19th goal, Landeskog’s 18th and MacKinnon’s 17th all slightly increased the chances of the Avalanche avoiding the additional embarrassment of not having a single 20-goal scorer. But there’s only one game left.
