Hah, watch. Next week, they’ll lose three in a row cuz of my post.

We have a rule in our house that you can only watch *TWO* hockey matches every week, so at least one every week is the Colorado Avalanche.

What a fun, spunky team they are to watch. They are ridiculously young, I think their average age is maybe 24 or 25, almost everyone on the team is a rookie, second-year or third-year player, and yet they are NO. 1 IN THE ENTIRE NHL in goals scored. They have scored 112 goals in 31 games, which mean they are on pace for 300 goals.

And with this very young team, they are 17-10-4, they have won four in a row, they are tied for first place in the Northwest Division with 38 points. Hockey is so weird. In the Western Conference, there are only two teams with losing records — there are 13 teams with winning records! How is that possible? It’s because of the dreaded “three-point” games, where no one loses. 🙂 In a three-point game, one team gets a 2-point win, while the other team doesn’t get a loss, it gets a single point for losing in overtime or a shootout. (If you think this is complicated, hockey for a while actually had four columns — wins, losses, overtime losses and ties. That was REALLY impossible to keep track of!)

So what does that mean? Almost every team in the NHL is a winner! 😀 It also means you have to have an incredibly good won-loss record to make one of the 8 playoff spots in the West. You could go 45-30-7 and miss the playoffs the way things are going (Apparently, back in the old days, when you had 21 teams and 16 playoff spots, you could have a pretty bad won-loss record and make the postseason. Not so anymore.). So, in the West, you have 12 teams that have between 33 and 43 points. The Avs are currently tied for second in the conference. If they lose their next game, they could drop all the way down to sixth. If they lose two games in a row, they could drop all the way down to 10th. It’s crazy. And exciting. Every game counts!

Hardly any of their players are famous. Milan Hejduk (pronounced like “Hayduke Lives”) is fairly well known. He is their one old veteran who was on the team when they won the Stanley Cup in 2001, but he has hardly played lately Chris Stewart is a rising superstar and was on pace to score 50 or 60 goals, but he broke his hand — but the team hasn’t slowed down. Their best players are Paul Stastny (son of Hall-of-Famer Peter Stastny), who has a big missing tooth and is either a Czech or an American, depending on who he wants to play for in the Olympics :lol:; Thomas Fleishmann, who scored a hat trick last night, Brandon Yip (I love his name!), David Jones and Matt Duchene. One of their better players, Peter Mueller, hasn’t played a single game all year and may not play for them at all this year because of a concussion he suffered in preseason. None of these guys are very famous, but they are leading the entire NHL in goals scored. Their goalie is Craig Anderson, an American who backed up Ryan Miller in the 2010 Olympics. Even he was hurt pretty bad and missed about a month, but that hasn’t stopped the Avs.

They will be fun to watch all year and it should be a roller coaster ride.