Take Town: What’s happening in Colorado?

It’s fair to wonder what’s going on in Colorado.

While obviously some teams are struggling early this season, the Colorado Avalanche are experiencing arguably the biggest disconnect between expectations (they could be contending for the Stanley Cup) and early reality (they’re conceding about 6.5 goals per 60 minutes).

You can console yourself if you want. It’s early. The underlying numbers are very good. The offense was solid, if not up to expectations. There were injuries. This is all true. But if we say it’s getting late early for the teams we expect to struggle, isn’t it also, in a sense, getting late early for the teams we expect to excel?

Obviously, it doesn’t take a genius to crack the code on this one: The Avs can’t get a save. Plain and simple. The team save percentage is still under .800 after four games, which makes it seem like it should be impossible. The starting goalkeeper, if you want to call him Alexandar Georgiyev, was substituted twice in four games and should have been substituted in the other two, but didn’t, for reasons that I think are more political (that’s not possible ). Pulling your goalkeeper into every game at the start of the season comes in handy.

The result is still the same. And you have to ask yourself what the end result is. According to the brain trust that runs the Avs, who we all would have said a week ago were among the best in the league, what is the problem here? Is it coaching? Is it a roster structure? Is it an increasingly obvious “this thing” that will prove itself? On the last point, I would like to say that goalkeeping performance will probably improve by 100 points at some point. That’s just how it works. But what if that happens in three, four, five games? Trading for a goalie doesn’t seem like a possible move just because of cap issues, and that’s also a reason not to change anything in the D corps or forward group; It’s probably just not feasible to trade without an NHL-level player who is actually good. You can regret something like that pretty quickly.

I don’t think they would sack the coach because he obviously gets a lot out of a great squad, recently won a trophy and so on. Firing a GM or anyone else isn’t going to make a difference any time soon.

So what is the solution? I guess my answer is “wait and see,” but I don’t think that’s a good option because I don’t think there’s a good option.

It’s only four games. Four incredibly bad games. Could be five. Hell, it could be ten. At this point, the root causes are perhaps more obvious. I still think they can make the playoffs. But it’s getting late early, so…

Let’s go:

Goalkeeper goals: old hat?

They’ve been playing NHL hockey for more than a century at this point, but the idea of ​​a goalie scoring a goal is relatively new. Billy Smith was the first to do so in November 1979, more than 50 years after the league began, but he was only credited with being the last on his team to touch the puck before the other team put it in their own Net shot.

It took another eight years for Ron Hextall to become the first goalkeeper to put the ball into the opposing team’s net, and a year and a half later he did it again. In the playoffs.

In total, 10 goaltenders have shot the puck into an empty net, but six of those occurred between 1979 and 2013. An average of about one every 16 years in NHL history up to that point. In the era of “goalkeeper goals,” if you can call it that, it averages one every 5.67 years.

But to illustrate that the whole “the new golden age is now” marketing also applies to netminders, note that there have been four goalie goals in the last four years.

Pekka Rinne on January 9, 2020. Linus Ullmark on February 25, 2023. Tristan Jarry on November 30, 2023. And now Filip Gustavsson on October 15, 2024. Damn if you want to lump Rinne in with the older folks, and just say that post-COVID goaltending is officially a thing, that’s fair. These days we get one a season and the pace is certainly increasing.

I don’t think we’ll ever get to the point where we say, “Who cares, it’s just a keeper’s goal” or something like that. But I’m shocked at how easy it seems to have become. Obviously more goalkeepers try it because they’re so skilled that it’s much more likely to happen. Igor Shesterkin seems obsessed with the idea of ​​scoring his own goal. Although there have never been two goalkeeper goals in a season, it seems inevitable.

The way things are going, I wonder if we’ll ever get to the point where the hockey world thinks, “Oh yeah, we’ll just expect most long-time starters to finish their careers with a goalie goal or two.” Only Hextall and Martin Brodeur have more than one. In fact, Brodeur is the all-time leader by three players. I expect someone will be aiming for this crown in the next few years.

That’s pretty cool and just goes to show that there’s always a new twist on an old game.

I love saying, “That’s a funny statistic!”

Alex Ovechkin hasn’t scored a goal this season – at this rate he’ll never overtake Wayne Gretzky!!! – but NHL.com had a funny video in which he asked a number of NHL players how many different goaltenders he has scored against in his career. The answer is 175, about 20 percent of all goaltenders who have ever played a single game in the NHL to whom all you can say is “lmao.”

And of course that doesn’t include his probably unbreakable NHL all-time record of 57 empty goals.

But as some of my favorite players get older, more fun statistics emerge. Evgeni Malkin just scored his 500th goal. Of course, Sidney Crosby got the first assist. And of course, when Crosby scored his 500th goal, Malkin had the area code. Malkin and Ovechkin are now the only two Russians to score 500 NHL goals in their careers, which makes sense given the historical geopolitics and the fact that only 48 guys have ever scored 500 goals.

And the crazy thing is, that number probably won’t increase much any time soon. Patrick Kane is the closest active player with 29 away games, but has not scored that many goals in a season since 2019/20. John Tavares is next, 42 away, and he’ll have to spend a good chunk of his salary to get enough Amulets to score that many over the next few years. And with all due respect to Corey Perry (430), Anze Kopitar (422) and Brad Marchand (401), these are the only active older guys who look like they could even pretend to make sense at 500 make approach. If We say they won’t make it, and it’s maybe 60/40 that both Kane and Tavares will make it. You have to think there’s a pretty good chance that Auston Matthews (369) will become the 50th 500-goal scorer in league history.

Isn’t that crazy? What a world.