Puck Daddy's previewing every team in the league with his great new format. The Avs are up, so let's jump and see what he has to tell us.

Continue reading this post »

I was looking at the recent draft history per year and noticed that they haven't been doing all that well, draft wise. Mainly in the first round they haven't been able to put the icing on the cake.

In my review I'm excluding picks later than the 2nd round as hardly any team, other than Detroit, could've expected those players to pan out.

So follow me after the jump and we'll see how they've fared in recent history:

Continue reading this post »

Remember how all the women in Denver were swooning and crying to see their tattoo'd hero vs. the Wild leave last summer? Well, he finally did it.

After Varlamov finally realised, in the second period, he's not supposed to be playing this well for his age, our beloved Jose Theodore got a chance to strut his stuff.

The endresult is probably best suscribed by this picture:

via 3.bp.blogspot.com

The Caps should've seen it coming. No matter how well your star player is, your goalie is always gonna suck monkeyballs.

Giguere talked about how hard it is to trade players nowadays, with all the teams being so close to the cap. This, to me, implied that he's willing to stirr things up a bit and make some roster changes.

As puck daddy is starting up their first 'rumors live chat', the Avs are being thrown to the sharks as sellers. According to the fourth period

According to a radio report stemming from Ottawa's Team 1200, the Avalanche and Senators are discussing a trade that might involve forward Marek Svatos and defenseman John-Michael Liles. It's uncertain what the Senators might ship back to Colorado in exchange.

JML and Svats combine for a cap hit of 6.3M, where the senators have 2.6M in capspace left. The 3.7M left could be traded our way in the shape of Mike Fisher (12 pts), a hockey player I know nothing about. But would there honestly be a single Avalanche fan interested in this trade? It looks absurd.

It's also very unlikely they're gonna be trading Alfredsson, the life-long face of the franchise.

Dany Heatley and his 7.5M caphit, however, could be making the trip to Denver. I'm sure we'd be able to pay him with all the injuries. He brings 0.95 pts/game to the table this season, exactly like Liles and Svatos (freaky coincidence; careerwise pts/g are also exactly the same at 1.10). This would look like a good trade for the Avalanche, as they'd be able to dress another player without expecting any point-production from him. Where are we gonna find another body to dress though, with all the injuries and all? My conclusion for this trade is, even though it looks tempting, a solid 'thanks, but no thanks'.

The same goes for the younger and cheaper Spezza, who would also better, as he's a center instead of a LW.

The biggest downside on both these trades is that both of these signings would make a return of Foppa, our savior, to the unipron even less likely.

Regardless of this rumour, I strongly believe that JML is one of the players that is in line (together with Stastny and Wolski maybe) to be the next face of the franchise.

I wouldn't mind seeing a "Tucker for Bruno" deal, with FG proudly admitting he made a mistake and makes up for it.

All Caphit numbers are from NHLnumbers

I already posted about this on Mirtle's From The Rink, but I wanted to get all your official positions as well.

Jussi Jokinen cleared waivers

I for one was expecting him to be our next 2nd line center. His cap is pretty low (1.8M) and he's a good player on a lousy team. I don't know about him 'being lazy', as that's what the Bolts players themselves are saying about their teammates (not Jussi in particular), but he hasn't been finding the net lately.

He's still in a different league to Tyler "what's the slowest pass I could possibly give to Wolski" Arnason altogether.

Just for the record, I was fully expecting some team to take him, as he's money, even though he's currently in a slump.

Hey, I know it's a little early in the season to start shouting things like this, but I was pleasantly surprised to see how the western divisions stack up:

Division / Points / Total games played / Points per game

Central / 48 / 43 / 1.116

Northwest / 49 /  39 / 1.256

Pacific / 45 / 43 / 1.047

It makes sense that the pts/g collumn is a little over 1, as that's (points team 1 + points team 2)/2 , when it's a regular time victory.

There are 2 reasons why the pts/g collumn are higher than 1. The first one being the obvious OT victories, and the second one being games won against other divisions.

I know the Northwest is always known as one of the tougher divisions, but do you think this trend will persist throughout the season, or is it all just a fluke? For one thing, the new schedule has helped out quite a bit in comparing division regarding their dominance in the NHL.

I realised the Avs are playing another SBNation team tonight, the Buffalo Sabres. DieByTheBlade already has their gameday thread up and are looking to hone in on our PK weakness.

This is probably gonna be the first real test the Avalanche have had since the start of this season, and it's going to be a hard fight.

This all won't matter as we'll be scoring a gazillion goals tonight against Ryan Miller, a very mediocre goalie from the east. Besides, Budaj showed great poise last game, so we don't have to worry about anything, right?

My prediction is that we're gonna win this one.