Arizona buried in Avalanche

In Denver, there should have been a mercy rule on Wednesday night.

The Colorado Avalanche scored five times in the first half of the opening period in a 9-3 shelling of the Arizona Coyotes.

Joonas Donskoi scored three goals of those five goals.

“We came out to play and we had a good start,” Donskoi said. “It’s just fun to play on this line right now with (Tyson) Jost and Val (Nichushkin). I know they’re going to work their [butts] off every shift, and those goals that I got, I got a couple lucky bounces and was able to put them in the back of the net. Playing with those two guys is super fun right now. I’m happy to be healthy and I’m feeling good, so hopefully it’s going to stay that way.”

The Avs led, 5-2, after the opening frame was done.

Philipp Grubauer made 28 saves in the win.

“We just weren’t ready to play,” Coyotes head coach Rick Tocchet said. “Maybe one or two guys had decent games. It was just a bad game by everybody. Bad decisions early. The game plan, right out the window the first couple of shifts. I don’t know if they were ready to play, it’s on me. I thought we were ready to play. It’s Colorado, they skate well. We had some guys who looked really slow out there tonight. I don’t know why they would be tired, we had two, three days off. It’s a head-scratcher.”

Michael Bunting, Oliver Ekman-Larsson and Conor Garland were the Arizona scorers.

“We were kind of making it a game,” the Coyotes’ Alex Goligoski said. “We got it to two and that one they got at the end of the period kind of set us right back. It kind of spiraled from there. You can’t let this stuff happen.”

Gabriel Landeskog struck twice for the Avs and had three points on the night.

“It was a lot of fun,” Colorado head coach Jared Bednar said. “You could tell our guys were excited about it by the way we came out. It’s just so much different playing in front of fans. We really missed it as a team and we wanted to put our best foot forward, and I thought we did that in the first period.”

Andre Burakovsky had a pair of goals for Colorado.

“It’s been a good season so far, the last month or five weeks we’ve really hit our stride once we started getting healthy,” Landeskog said. “We knew what kind of team we had, and I think we’ve shown it over the last five, six weeks. There’s still steps we can take. For us, it’s important that we keep working, keep trying to achieve first place in the division when the season is over and put ourselves in a good spot for the playoffs.”

Mikko Rantanen and Pierre-Edouard Bellemare added single markers in the win.