Not Surprising

The Avs dropped tonight's game, and who's surprised? Not me, even though I clearly have tonight's game as a "W" in my previous blog. I thought maybe the boys in burgundy and blue could pull one out, but I was sadly mistaken.

Tonight was a pretty clear example of how crappy this team is, or at least how crappy they can be. It wasn't a horrible, or even bad performance, but it's a pretty clear indicator of why Colorado won't be winning the cup this year unless some pretty significant changes are made.

Granato must have realized that he wasn't getting enough balanced offense, so he put Sakic with Smyth and Hejduk, bumping Stastny down to a line with Svatos and Wolski. Those six forwards have scored a combined 18 goals. The trouble is that 14 of those goals have come from the Smyth-Stastny-Hejduk trio. Wolski hasn't scored since opening night, and that goal arguably shouldn't have counted.

Budaj still needs to be much better. Some nights I think to myself "wow, he looks as good as anyone out there tonight". Other nights I think "wow, I could have got a blocker on that!". It's his job to stop pucks, and he'll be out of a job if he continues to play like this over the next 20-30 games.

The first goal was horrible, and so was the last goal. The Altitude announcers can water it down all they want, talking about things like bad bounces and such. But it's their job to be a little biased, not mine. A real shoddy goaltending performance yet again from Peter Budaj.

If I were GM (which most of you know I'm not), I'd be dumping the salaries of Svatos and Arnason right about now. A combined 3.7 million dollars in salary has only translated to 3 goals from the duo over the first 11 games. Not only that, but they're a combined -3, so they haven't exactly been Madden and Pandolfo out there.

That's all I've got to say. Actually, one other thing: Nabokov is overrated. He's going to have to play a heck of alot better if the Sharks planning on going deep this year in the playoffs.