The Avalanche Get no Respect!

"Know the one about the so-so hockey team that won against all odds?"

Fresh off its 5-4 shootout victory over the Detroit Red Wings on Monday, the Colorado Avalanche began to answer several lingering questions left over from last season’s disappointing finish.

At the forefront of that list was:

1) Can Craig Anderson continue to write the script to his own Hollywood biopic and stay a legitimate number-one goaltender after years of being just an above-average back-up?

2) Will Matt Duchene and Ryan O’Reilly continue to develop at an other-worldly pace?

3) Who is Brandon Yip??? And is it okay to make fun of his name?

Well, clearly, the answers to at least two of those three are still unclear, while the answer to the third goes something like this:

“He’s a no-name player of Chinese origin who came out of nowhere [more accurately Vancouver, British Columbia and then Boston University] to score 11 goals and 17 points in his first 22 NHL games, before cooling off and scoring just one in his last 10. And, why would anyone want to make fun of the name Brandon?”

Yip’s rookie season aside, he has notched two points in three games so far this year and also added the only goal scored in the aforementioned shootout victory. No, he may not constitute the game’s prototypical success story, but he is a fine example of the Avalanche’s success last year, which clearly resulted from an experiment that would have probably left even the mad Dr. Frankenstein scratching his head. Scientific theory be damned, management essentially threw a vast array of spare parts, cast-offs, unproven talent, and has-beens against an adhesive-laced wall just to see what would stick.

Like being pleasantly surprised after trying to breed a horse with a rottweiler and getting Cerberus, they got a pretty decent team out of it. That's even taking into account its 3-7-3 finish and its first-round playoff exit that saw its only two game-winning goals get scored accidentally by San Jose Sharks. I mean two-thirds of the Avalanche are comprised of players that weren’t even on anybody’s radar screen two years ago... Duchene included. The other third? Players like Anderson and Milan Hejduk who many thought were destined for support roles at the different stages of their respective careers. And, yet, until that final stretch of the season, the Avalanche acted like one collective hive mind led by star Paul Stastny that could do no wrong.

"What's that? Is it? It is! It's my stalled hockey career!"

Case in point would be the nonsensical decision to acquire Peter Mueller for Wojtek Wolski. Under normal circumstances, many general managers wouldn’t dare trade one star in the making that was producing (albeit at a slower pace than desired) for an apparent one-season wonder that wasn’t, but Greg Sherman decided that Mueller was worth the risk. The move paid off with Mueller putting his 17-points-in-54-games performance with the Phoenix Coyotes behind him en route to a spectacular finish to the season that saw him score 20 in 15... before getting injured. Now, his off-season auditions for the local Man of La Mancha production having fallen through, he seems ready to pick up right where he left off. But good intentions don’t necessarily lead to results. Mueller does also kind of look like the Devil, but I won’t go so far as to say that Colorado is on the road to Hell. The state’s far too cold for that and one obscure reference is enough for a guy that also looks like that one weird loner no one wants to be friends with in high-school.

It’s weird to say, but the team’s chances vary greatly between what is expected to happen after last year and what should happen, two years removed from a last-place finish in the Western Conference. In essence, the Avs haven’t proven anyone wrong. All they’ve done is temporarily satisfy the critics, put off answering the questions that are now certain to be asked by the end of this season... delay the inevitable crashing down to Earth.