Take Town: What's happening in Colorado?

Fair to question what’s going on in Colorado.

While there are obviously a number of teams struggling early this season, the Colorado Avalanche are experiencing what has to be the biggest dissonance between expectation (they could contend for the Stanley Cup) and early reality (giving up about 6.5 goals per 60 minutes).

You can console yourself, if you want to. It’s early. The underlying numbers are very good. The offence has been solid, if not up to expectations. There have been injuries. That’s all true. But if we’re saying it gets late early for the teams we expect to struggle, does it not get late early in certain ways for the teams expected to excel?

Obviously, you don’t need to be 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, after four games, below .800, which feels like it ought to be impossible. The starting goalie, if you want to call him Alexandar Georgiyev at this point, has been pulled twice in four games and should have been pulled in the other two, but hasn’t been for reasons I figure are more political (you can’t pull your goalie in every game to start the season) than practical.

The outcome is the same regardless. And you’ve got to wonder what the end result is. What does the brain trust running the Avs, which we all would have said a week ago was among the best in the league, think is the problem here? Is it coaching? Is it roster construction? Is it an increasingly unignorable “one of those things” that will work itself out? To the last point, I mean, the goaltending is probably going to improve by 100 points sometime. That’s just, like, how it works. But what if that’s three, four, five games from now? Trading for a goalie doesn’t seem like a potential move just because of the cap problems, and that’s also a reason not to change anything in the D corps or forward group; it’s probably just not feasible without trading an NHL-level asset who’s actually good. That’s the kind of thing you can come to regret pretty quickly.

I don’t think they would fire the coach because he obviously gets a lot out of a great roster, recently won a Cup, and so on. Firing a GM or someone else isn’t going to make a difference anytime soon.

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

It’s only four games. Four unbelievably bad games. Could turn into five. Hell, it could turn into 10. At that point, maybe the root causes are more obvious. I still think they make the playoffs, for the record. But it gets late early, so…

Let's go:

Goalie 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 it, in November 1979, more than 50 years after the league started, but he was just credited for being the last person on his team to touch the puck before the other team put it in their own net.

It took another eight years before Ron Hextall became the first goalie to shoot it into the other team's net, and he did it again a year and a half later. In the playoffs.

In all, 10 goalies have shot the puck into an empty net, but six of those happened between 1979 and 2013. An average of about one every 16 years in NHL history to that point. In the "goalie goal" era, if we can call it that, it's an average of one every 5.67 years.

But as if to illustrate that all that "the new golden age is now" marketing applies to netminder as well, you gotta note that there have been four goalie goals in the last four years.

Pekka Rinne on Jan. 9, 2020. Linus Ullmark on Feb. 25, 2023. Tristan Jarry on Nov. 30, 2023. And now Filip Gustavsson on Oct. 15, 2024. Hell, if you want to lump Rinne in with the older guys and just say that the post-COVID goalie goal is officially A Thing, that's fair. We're getting one a season these days, and the pace is certainly accelerating.

I don't think we'll ever get to the point where we're saying, "Who cares, it's just a goalie goal," or anything like that. But I am shocked at how easy it has seemingly become. More goalies are clearly trying it, because they are skilled enough that it's way more likely to happen. Igor Shesterkin seems obsessed with the idea of scoring his own. While there's never been two goalie goals in one season, that feels like an inevitability.

The way things are going, I do wonder if we ever get to the point when the hockey world is like, "Oh yeah, we just kind of expect most longtime starters to finish their careers with a goalie goal or two." Only Hextall and Martin Brodeur have more than one. Brodeur, in fact, is the all-time leader with three. I gotta think someone's coming for that crown in the next few years here.

That's pretty cool, and it just goes to show there's always a new twist on an old game. 

I love saying "That's a fun stat!"

Alex Ovechkin hasn't scored a goal yet this season — he'll never pass Wayne Gretzky at this rate!!! — but NHL.com had a fun video asking a bunch of NHLers how many different goalies he's scored on in his career. The answer is 175, something like 20 percent of all goalies to ever play even a single game in the NHL, to which you can only say "lmao." 

And that obviously doesn't include his all-time, probably unbreakable NHL record of 57 empty netters.

But as some of my favorite players get older, there are more fun stats popping up all the time. Evgeni Malkin just scored his 500th goal. Sidney Crosby, of course, got the primary assist. And when Crosby scored his 500th, of course Malkin had the primary. Malkin and Ovechkin are now the only two Russians to reach 500 career NHL goals, which makes sense when you consider the historical geopolitics and the fact that only 48 guys have ever scored 500 in the first place.

And what's crazy is that number probably won't increase too much anytime soon. Patrick Kane is the closest active player, and he's 29 away, but he hasn't scored that many goals in a season since 2019-20. John Tavares is next, 42 away, and he's gonna have to spend a good chunk of his salary to get enough amulets to score that many in the next couple years. And with all due respect to Corey Perry (430), Anze Kopitar (422) and Brad Marchand (401), those are the only active older guys who seem like they could even pretend they're gonna make a meaningful approach at 500. If we're saying they don't get there, and it's maybe 60/40 that both Kane and Tavares get there, you gotta think there's a pretty good chance that Auston Matthews (369) becomes the 50th 500-goal scorer in league history.

Isn't that crazy? What a world.