The Colorado Avalanche will be without winger Valeri Nichushkin for the Stanley Cup Playoffs and for several months as he was placed in Stage 3 of the NHL/NHLPA Assistance Program.

The announcement came hours before the Avalanche took on the Dallas Stars in Game 4 of their Western Conference semifinals matchup. It’s the second time this season he’s been in the program, and Stage 3 means he violated the terms of the program.

“Under the terms of the joint program, Nichushkin will be suspended without pay for a minimum of six months and then will be eligible to apply for reinstatement,” a joint statement read.

He was leading the team with nine playoff goals.

Nichushkin was out for nearly two months earlier in the season to receive care from the program for issues that were not disclosed. It came on the heels of missing the final five games of a playoff exit last season for what the team called personal reasons.

During the Avalanche’s playoff series against the Seattle Kraken last season, he left the team for personal reasons. His absence started after officers were called to a crisis at a hotel before Game 3. A 28-year-old woman was reportedly in an ambulance when police arrived, and medics were told to speak with an Avalanche team physician to gather more details.

Valeri Nichushkin #13 of the Colorado Avalanche prepares for a first period face-off against the Winnipeg Jets in Game Five of the First Round of the 2024 Stanley Cup Playoffs at Canada Life Centre on April 30, 2024 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. (Jonathan Kozub/NHLI via Getty Images)

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A Seattle police report said the Avalanche physician told officers that team employees found the woman when they checked on Nichushkin, The Associated Press reported. The physician told officers the woman appeared to be heavily intoxicated, too intoxicated to have left the hotel in a cab or otherwise and requested EMS assistance.

“I know you guys want to find something there, but it’s nothing really interesting. I think we should close it,” he said before the season when asked about the incident.

FILE – Colorado Avalanche forward Valeri Nichushkin celebrates his goal during the second period of the team’s NHL hockey game against the Buffalo Sabres, Feb. 4, 2020, in Buffalo, N.Y. (AP Photo/Jeffrey T. Barnes, File)

In the 54 games he did play during the 2023-24 season, he scored 28 goals and racked up 53 points.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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When the season ends, and the Dodgers reflect on their 162-game journey through the schedule, the details of Monday’s game against the San Francisco Giants aren’t likely to be remembered.

The result probably will be lumped in with dozens of others, another indistinguishable thread in the tapestry of a six-month season.

But for one crisp Bay Area night, in front of a split crowd of 35,000 at Oracle Park, both the Dodgers and the Giants — and large swaths of their rival fan bases — hung on the anticipation of every little twist.

And in the Dodgers’ 6-4 win, there were plenty of them in a game that featured an early pitchers’ duel, a late-inning bullpen battle, and a dramatic extra-inning ending, when Will Smith hammered a go-ahead two-run double in the top of the 10th and J.P. Feyereisen converted an improbable save for a shorthanded Dodgers bullpen.

“A lot of weird stuff tends to happen in this stadium, especially late in games,” said longtime Dodgers utilityman Kiké Hernández, who helped push the game to extras with a tying home run in the seventh.

“I think there’s something to the rivalry,” manager Dave Roberts added. “Regardless of records, it seems like we always have tight ballgames.”

On this night, the fireworks started early. Mookie Betts hit a leadoff home run — ending a 26-game home run drought, and giving him his 50th career leadoff blast — only for Giants center fielder Luis Matos to answer in the second inning with a three-run drive to left.

The starting pitchers offered little separation, with Giants right-hander Jordan Hicks giving up two runs over five innings, and Dodgers right-hander Yoshinobu Yamamoto surrendering four runs for the Dodgers (28-15) while pitching into the sixth.

The Dodgers tied the score at 3-3 by manufacturing runs in the fifth (on a Shohei Ohtani infield single) and sixth (on a Gavin Lux ground-rule double). They did it again the seventh, knotting the score at 4-4 on Hernández’s pinch-hit home run.

Finally, the tension reached its apex in the bottom of the 10th.

With several of their top relievers out because of injuries, and all of their available late-inning choices having been burned in the regulation innings, the Dodgers were down to Feyereisen — an injury-plagued veteran with a 9.00 ERA this season — as their best option remaining in the bullpen.

That made Smith’s two-run double in the top of the inning imperative, arriving at a crucial time for both the catcher (who entered the night in an 0-for-16 slump) and the team (which was coming off a series loss to the San Diego Padres).

“For us to ‘struggle’ in San Diego … and [tonight] come back and tie the game, tie the game and take the lead late in the game, it was good,” Hernández said. “Hopefully we get rolling again.”

Monday was rich with other minor subplots, in the first of a three-game series at Oracle Park.

The game marked the first trip both Ohtani and Yamamoto had made to San Francisco since this offseason, when they both legitimately considered the Giants as free agents before spurning them for record-breaking contracts with the Dodgers.

“Having those two guys in orange and black would change the landscape,” Roberts said pregame, before adding with a grin. “I think they look better in Dodger blue.”

Ohtani was greeted with a hostile reception. Unlike last month’s trip to Toronto, there were no unanimous boos from a crowd with large swaths of Dodger blue. But, there was plenty of heckling from those in orange and black — including a sign from one Giants fan that read “Parlay Shohei,” in an apparent dig at the gambling scandal surrounding his ex-interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara.

Yamamoto, meanwhile, was approached after the first inning by the umpires, who were checking to see if his blue glove had too strong of a white accent (MLB regulates glove colors to ensure batters can distinguish the ball on each pitch).

“They said something about the white Nike logo on there, they didn’t know if that was allowable,” Roberts said. “But they were just giving us heads up.”

After Yamamoto made way, Roberts had to navigate five leverage innings without some of the top arms in his banged-up bullpen.

Alex Vesia limited damage in the sixth, after Yamamoto walked two batters and gave up a go-ahead run on a Heliot Ramos single that got past Betts at shortstop.

The Dodgers then got consecutive zeros from Michael Grove, Daniel Hudson and, in the bottom of the ninth, Blake Treinen — who recorded a crucial pick-off at first base to post his fourth scoreless outing since returning from injury.

Then, after Smith put the Dodgers in front in the top of the 10th, Feyereisen induced a game-ending double-play for just his fifth career save, putting a climatic final touch on Monday’s rollicking one-night script.

To this day, 43 years later, Darryl Strawberry still has a nickname for his 1981 season with the Class A Lynchburg Mets.

“I call it,” Strawberry said by phone last week, “the suck season.”

The suck season was, at the time, the most challenging of Strawberry’s life. It was the season he first confronted failure on the baseball diamond. It was the season he first heard racist slurs from the stands. It was the season he came oh-so-close to quitting baseball and hanging up his jersey for good.

And so when Strawberry’s No. 18 is retired June 1 at Citi Field, it’s only fitting that among his honored guests will be the two people who pushed him through the suck season: manager Gene Dusan and teammate Lloyd McClendon.

“Everybody looks at the success, but I look at the people who had a great impact on me,” Strawberry said. “There’s no way that I would be standing on the field having my number retired had it not been for people like them getting me through the most challenging, difficult times at a young age.”

The first month of Strawberry’s first full season in pro ball had not gone well. Failing on the field for the first time is hard enough for any player. Strawberry had several extra spotlights on him.

The prior summer, he had been the No. 1 pick out of Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles, where his coach had called him “the black Ted Williams” in Sports Illustrated. His signing bonus, while not a record, more than doubled that of the previous No. 1 pick.

And he was a black man playing in a southern city in Virginia. So when he struggled on the field, he heard it from the Carolina League crowds. Home games, road games, any games — Strawberry heard the worst of it.

“They were calling me all kind of names and saying negative things,” Strawberry said. “You’re talking about the deep south. I was like, ‘This is crazy.’ I grew up in Southern California and we never had to experience that growing up.”

“Listen, it was 1981. Society as a whole didn’t quite embrace us — black folks,” McClendon said. “They used to pass the hat for anybody who hit a home run. We hit home runs and we got nothing.”

By early May, Strawberry wanted to take his bat into the stands, he said. Instead, he took his bat home.

“I just checked out,” he said. “I did go AWOL.”

“He left for a couple days,” Dusan said. “It was concerning that he left. I felt like he’d be back. I knew he’d be back.”

Rather than chase Strawberry, Dusan gave him space. He didn’t even tell the higher-ups in the Mets front office.

“If I did that today, they’d fire me,” he chuckled. “Things were different in the early ’80s.”

Two days later, Strawberry returned to the park, thanks largely to his relationships with Dusan and McClendon. Strawberry and McClendon had bonded the year before in rookie ball in Kingsport, Tenn., when they roomed together and had each other’s backs during their first summer in the South.

“I guess we had to protect each other,” McClendon said.

And McClendon hadn’t been there at the start of the ’81 season in Lynchburg because of a broken hand he suffered in spring training. But when Strawberry left the team, that rehab period became a lot shorter for McClendon.

“When I saw him at the park, then I was happy,” Strawberry said, “to see a face and someone of color just like me.”

Dusan made sure the two roomed together again, even though McClendon had gotten married.

“You have to take care of him,” McClendon remembered Dusan saying, “because he’s not going to make it if you don’t.”

“I don’t know if I was old enough to be a mentor at the time,” said McClendon, who was 22 that season, “but I was certainly a friend and a voice he could talk to. Whatever little wisdom that I had I tried to pass along.”

And Dusan’s tough-love approach as a manager was what Strawberry needed at that point. The day Strawberry returned to the club, Dusan didn’t exactly rejoice.

“I’m glad you’re back. I’m glad you’re healthy,” he told the player. “We’ve got to go to work.”

From that day forward, Dusan remembered, Strawberry became the best player he ever coached.

“He was there every day for extra hitting,” Dusan said. “Once he applied himself, he was the man.”

There was a reason Strawberry was always there for extra hitting.

“Let me put it this way: In a very good way, Gene was a pain in the ass to Darryl and I,” McClendon said. “When we were on the road, he would wake us up at 8 every morning and we had go to the ballpark. I guess he saw something special in both of us. He saw it in Darryl, for sure.”

“Gene Dusan was like a father figure to me that I didn’t have. He embraced me to fight through some adversities early,” Strawberry said. “I became a part of his family. It was just very personal to me.”

How much a part of the family? Strawberry helped babysit Dusan’s children.

“Geno kept me going, kept me focused on not looking up there and interacting with the people up there (in the stands),” Strawberry said. “That really helped me because I really didn’t want to play anymore, for a minute there.”

“He taught us so much about not just baseball but life in general and how you go about your business,” said McClendon, who went on to manage more than 1,100 major-league games. “You stand up and live by your word and learn to be a man of honor. It was pretty cool.”

For Strawberry, the suck season remains an important part of his story. That first experience of adversity helped him through the many later challenging periods he endured, both self-inflicted and not. It was a learning moment, he said, one that came up whenever his children wanted to give something up at a difficult time.

In ’82, playing for Dusan in Double-A Jackson, Miss., Strawberry broke through with 34 homers, 45 stolen bases and an OPS over 1.000. Two years after the suck season, Strawberry was the National League’s Rookie of the Year.

“I made the right decision to fight through the adversities and start believing,” Strawberry said. “I’m forever thankful for that and for real people. These are real people. These are not people that sugarcoat everything about you. But the people that showed me how to overcome.”

“It’s hard to believe,” Dusan said about watching the teenager he managed have his number retired. “I appreciate how he feels about me. I’m proud of him.”

(Photo of Darryl Strawberry batting for the Mets circa 1984: Focus on Sport / Getty Images)