• Preview
• Recap
• Bleachers

Wolski's two goals lift Avalanche over Blackhawks

Dec 24, 2006 - 6:16 AM DENVER (Ticker) -- Wojtek Wolski twice, including the go-ahead tally in the third period, to lift the Colorado Avalanche to a 3-2 victory over the Chicago Blackhawks.

The two goals helped Wolski break out of a dry spell in which he only scored once in his last 10 games and helped Colorado win its fifth game in its last six starts.

The Avalanche have outscored their opponents, 16-6, in four consecutive home victories.

"We place an emphasis on winning games at home," Colorado coach Joel Quenneville said. "We weren't pleased with being at .500 (only) 20 games into it (home schedule). Teams coming in here, we want to make sure they play at the tempo we set, and force it to be a high-pressure game, and hopefully they have to adapt to it.

"We feel if we can be .500 on the road and take care of business here, we'll be in fine shape."

Wolski scored the deciding goal at 4:32 of the third session when he took a pass from captain Joe Sakic from behind the net and snapped the puck past netminer Nikolai Khabibulin to give the Avalanche a 3-2 lead.

"We've got a great group of guys on this team," Wolski said. "We had a 2-on-1 with (Sakic) and Joe definitely could have shot and probably scored, but he chose to pass it over to me."

"I did see it," Khabibulin said of Wolski's shot. "I just didn't get there in time. He beat me far side."

Wolski's first goal gave the Avalanche a 2-1 lead at 10:22 of the first period, when he fired a wrist shot from the slot past Khabibulin.

Sakic scored the other Colorado goal while Jose Theodore recorded 17 saves.

"Chicago came at us pretty hard in the third but we didn't panic," Theodore said. "I really like the way our team played tonight."

Radim Vrbata and Patrick Sharp scored the goals for Chicago, which fell to 7-3-3 since Denis Savard took over as coach on November 27.

"It was a tough game for us," Savard said. "We played a lot of hockey here in the last little while. It took us a while to get our legs going and we're a little tired. We battled hard."