In Game 5 against the Kraken, there will be no Cale Makar, no Valeri Nichushkin, no Gabriel Landeskog, no Nazem Kadri, no Andre Burakovsky and no hope for the Avalanche fans who can’t help but compare this team to last year’s.

Makar is suspended one game for his hit on Jared McCann. Nichushkin has been ruled out for Game 5 as he remains away from the team, with coach Jared Bednar citing personal reasons. The Avs are depleted again with a knotted 2-2 first-round series.

Here are three keys to an Avalanche rebound Wednesday (7:30 p.m. MT, ESPN) at Ball Arena.

1. Score first, just once. Nathan MacKinnon said after Game 3 that he thinks the Avs play more aggressively when they’re down a goal. So be it, but that shouldn’t be a reason to offer the Kraken first blood on a nightly basis. It’s true that the Avs have been significantly better with a deficit than a lead. Five of the last six times they’ve held a two-goal lead before the third period, the game has ended up tied. And on the reverse end, they have erased two-goal holes twice in this series (Games 2 and 4). For their next trick, how about figuring out how to play good hockey when it’s scoreless? The Kraken have scored first in every game, with three of those four opening goals coming within four minutes of puck drop. The other took a sluggish 6:08.

2. Who runs the top power play? When Makar missed games this season, coach Jared Bednar alternated between Devon Toews and Bo Byram as his preferred defenseman to quarterback the power play from the point. “Whichever one we feel at the time is the best option there,” Bednar told The Post in Los Angeles this April. “Part of it, though, is we like Bo on that flank. Toews is more used to playing the top.” Byram has been dynamic this entire series, but the one thing he’s missing is a goal. The power play finally broke its drought in Game 4 thanks to Mikko Rantanen staying on with the second unit. Also with Byram or Toews moving up, Colorado’s novel three-defenseman second unit will be dispersed.

3. All the marbles on Moose and Mac. Speaking of Rantanen, his ability to single-handedly shift the power dynamic of a game even after not playing his sharpest hockey is a terrifying trait for the Kraken. He has five goals in four games to sufficiently overcome several sloppy moments. The Avs are rapidly running out of weapons, so the scoring responsibility rests now more than ever on Rantanen and MacKinnon. Those two combined for 97 regular-season goals — 35.4% of the team’s scoring — and they combined for six of Colorado’s eight goals in Games 3 and 4 of this series. Can they keep that up, carrying two separate lines enough to mitigate the X-factor of Seattle’s depth?

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