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Whether this is the Mac or the Pumpkins for mixtape purposes is up for a vote, I suppose.
I'll be honest, I haven't watched much of the Avs during their hot start, which is now cooling off quite a bit: lost their last three in regulation and four of the last ten. I do know that Giguere and the abuser of women were rocking like a .940 sv% for a while there, which was never going to last. Even when they were coached by a drooling simpleton, the Avs have always been a tough match for the Hawks because they play a similar run-and-gun style, which zigs from the West's typical plodding zags and catches the Hawks off guard. I wonder if the altitude has anything to do with it, too.
That Sakic and Roy are running hockey operations for the Avs shouldn't really be news to any of us. This whole thing with the star players taking over the organization feels really Pulford Blackhawks to me, just like the shitshow in Edmonton where anyone who shared a dressing room with Wayne Gretzky is allowed to make important decisions, but I think it's instructive to understand just how mismanaged and lifeless the Avs had been before Sakic/Roy. It's a twofold fall from glory: creepy old Stan Kroenke owns the Avalanche, the Nuggets, Arsenal FC, and the St. Louis Rams, but to buy the Rams, he had to divest his Denver interests on paper so as not to have a conflict of interest. Obviously, the hockey team wound up at #4 on that depth chart, and so the organization had really been run without any fucks given for about the last, oh, five or six years now. Joe Sacco coached that team into a ditch for years, but no one was minding the store enough to notice and fire him.
The other part, which I always found kind of weird, was the Avalanche's petulant response to the institution of a salary cap. Basically, if they couldn't buy their way to a championship, they wouldn't even try to build a cap-compliant contender, and so basically they just went on cruise control in the new NHL. Of course, Denver is a crowded sports market where people can also find better things to do than watch sports on TV, and so without the expectation of a championship, attendance went from a long sellout streak to around 9,000 a game. It's the same deal as Dallas: they were spoiled with ready-made superteams back in the cash-flush late '90s, which made hockey more a fad than a following. Take away the "we can buy anyone we want and always be good" dynamic and both hockey markets have since withered down to nothing.
I think Roy will flame out fast and run back to the loving embrace of the Quebec Remparts, but Sakic was always a cerebral player and could turn out to be a good GM or whatever they're calling him so as not to offend useless moron Greg Sherman. This roster is pretty good, but not as great as it had been playing to this point (or at least until a week ago). Nathan MacKinnon will be dangerous, Gabriel Landeskog already is, and Matt Duchene, as much as I hate the little pudwhack for celebrating every goal like it won the Stanley Cup, is quite talented as well. Jamie McGinn was a player the Sharks really should have held onto, seeing as they lost him for I want to say Daniel Winnik, who left for Anaheim anyway.
I was looking at penalty infraction minutes and was pleased to see a huge gap between Chicago's 8.4 PIM/game and Colorado's 14.7. But if you only look at minors, and not in the Patrick Kane way, you'll see both teams have 70 on the year, and that the difference is in the Avalanche's 14 majors and 6 misconducts (one game). Compare with the Hawks, who have only three majors on the year: two fights with Ryan Reaves, and one with Rich Clune. I don't know where the two misconducts came from. The point is, the Avs seem to have as much incidental contact as the Hawks, but also like to do dumb things a lot.
With Khabibulin pretty much nuked from the roster forever, I expect Crawford to start this game and then maybe give Raanta a chance against Winnipeg. Let's hope Hossa is back for the Hawks. Still not sure how he got hurt.
Hawks: 14-3-4, 11-5-5 adjusted, 26.380 points expected (overachieving by less than a point, who cares)
Avs: 14-5-0, no point inflation, 26.177 points expected (overachieving by about one win)
Hawks: 3.571 scored (1st!), 2.810 allowed (22nd), .762 differential (5th)
Avs: 3.105 scored (5th), 2.158 allowed (5th), .947 differential (4th)
Hawks: 15/71, 21.1% on the power play (8th); 45/61, 73.8% on the kill (29th)
Avs: 11/57, 19.3% on the power play (14th); 52/62, 83.9% on the kill (9th)
_________________ Molly Lambert wrote: The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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