It’s time to get tougher for the Avs, or they’ll be fly­ing home Tues­day on Nathan MacKinnon’s 25th birthday.

The Avalanche deliv­ered a club-record 72 hits in last week’s Game 3 against the Dal­las Stars — the only game Col­orado has won in the series. In Sunday’s Game 4, a 5–4 loss that put the Avs on the verge of elim­i­na­tion, they were cred­it­ed with just 36 hits — exact­ly half as the pre­vi­ous game.

A sim­i­lar decline in blocked shots took place in those two games in Edmon­ton. Col­orado blocked just nine shots Sun­day, com­pared to 22 for the Stars, after the Avs held a 25–19 edge in Game 3.

The bot­tom line: Col­orado must be more phys­i­cal all over the ice and make more indi­vid­ual sac­ri­fices when the Stars have the puck in the offen­sive zone if it hopes to extend the series to Wednesday’s sched­uled Game 6 at Rogers Place.

Avs coach Jared Bed­nar, in his pregame news con­fer­ence, said he expects his team to be an angry bunch Mon­day night based on the col­lec­tive mood.

“It’s grumpy. I feel like our team has a lit­tle snarl on, which is I think a good thing,” the coach said. “I don’t think anyone’s sit­ting in here feel­ing sor­ry for them­selves. We’ve had a dis­cus­sion on how we feel the series has gone and where we are as a team. We’re just get­ting our minds right to get ready here tonight to start on time and get after it. I think our guys are, like I said, a lit­tle bit grumpy and a lit­tle bit angry this morn­ing and I expect them to play that way tonight.”

As for deliv­er­ing body checks, Bed­nar not­ed his team’s num­ber was down Sun­day for a vari­ety of rea­sons — includ­ing the fact Dal­las was far more phys­i­cal at the out­set and that dis­rupt­ed the Avs’ abil­i­ty to get up and down the ice.

“We’re known to be a puck-pres­sure team. We use our legs. We’re phys­i­cal and hard to play against, gen­er­al­ly, because we’re skat­ing and using our legs,” Bed­nar said. “I do think our hit total was down (Sun­day) because the first peri­od we were on our heels quite a bit. Also, lots of spe­cial teams in (Sunday’s) game so you’re not run­ning around and hit­ting peo­ple with that much pow­er play and penal­ty kill involved.

“But we did have more bite, more grit in our game the game before, 72 hits. I don’t have a num­ber set on it. I just want our team to play a cer­tain way, with a cer­tain amount of tenac­i­ty and pres­sure on the puck every­where. It’s not, for me, about just lay­ing into guys all over the place or run­ning around look­ing for that to prove that we’re com­pet­i­tive. It’s about doing it with­in our system.”

Col­orado played too soft in front of goalie Pavel Fran­couz on Sun­day, some­thing MacK­in­non point­ed out after the game. And the Avs aren’t block­ing enough shots in the defen­sive zone and clear­ing sec­ond-chance opportunities.

“I think we’re los­ing that bat­tle right now and it’s hurt­ing us,” Bed­nar said. “We got to be stronger in front of the net. They’re com­ing in there look­ing for rebounds. We have to win some of those bat­tles by body posi­tion, get­ting under sticks, estab­lish­ing that body posi­tion ear­ly in our defend­ing, no rest in our game down there, and then we got to col­lapse and clear some pucks. They’re get­ting too many of those rebounds.

“They’re get­ting bod­ies down there. They’ve been throw­ing pucks at our goalie and try and bang away. There’s chances where we can make life on our goalies a lit­tle bit easier.

“As D‑men there’s things we can do to make it tougher on them, for sure.”