I can't believe I'm actually wasting time blogging about the Colorado Crapalanche, but since Greg is going to be doing that often enough, I might as well get used to the infestation.

As of the best information I could gather, we can see that the Avalanche are yet another one of those clubs spending around $40mil of cap space to field a mediocre club.

Per HockeyAnalysis.com, the Avs are paying $4.6mil for bonuses pertaining to LAST season. Nothing worse than paying cap space for things that happened in the past. Some pre-cap contract issues are coming back to haunt the Avs, and I couldn't be happier for them.



Goaltending: The Avalanche had a cheaper, better-performing option on David Aebischer and they traded him...WHY? Well, apparently Aebischer doesn't have 'big game' experience/ability and he isn't Quebecois.

All they have is an extremely expensive, balding goaltender with a family deeply connected with the Hell's Angels. To top it off, his idea of a quality date is to cheat on his current girl with Paris Hilton. Talk about 'binning'. *ick*

A look at Jose's SV%'s over the past few seasons
2000-01: 90.9%
2001-02: 93.1%
2002-03: 90.8%
2003-04: 91.9%
2005-06: 88.2%

Hmm, can you say one fluke season? 2003-04 wasn't so bad, but Jose's true ability seems to be around the 91.0% area when you smooth things out.

Defence: Quantity versus Quantity. Brett Clark making $1.5mil? In this universe? Patrice Breezeby...oh boy... at least this unit has 8 solid NHL defensemen and depth is important in case of injuries or in case some other team is dumb enough to trade something of value for Brisebois. Jordon Leopold and J-M Liles give this unit a good bit of offence from the back end, while Klee, an old favourite of mine, may be too far past his prime to be effective any longer. Still, none of these 8 are first-line quality. It's going to take a real team effort and a lot of juggling to make this a unit that works well.

Forwards: I know Marek Svatos and his wonky shoulders normally plays on a line with Joe Sakic, so these lines aren't a great guess on my part. This forward corps has some of everything with good defensive stalwarts like Laperriere and Konowalchuk with the offensive Sakic, Tin Man, Hejduk, and so forth. The wild-cards are definitely Wojtek Wolski and Tyler Arnason. Arnason is talented and can be productive, but is also extremely lazy and it appears that the Avs may not have room for him. Wolski may get a full-time gig this season and could rip 20+ goals.

Overall: I like the Avs ability to score goals and perhaps they can make a decent producer out of Arnason. The loss of Rob Blake will hurt, but probably not as much as people would expect. The simple fact is that this looks to be a .500 team at best unless Theodore can somehow find the form he had during his one dream season. If Theodore can't regain his game, the Avs are sunk.

Just another team for the Canucks to walk over on the quest for the cup, eh!