The Avalanche's season (in the abyss)
The A.V. Club's weekly sports infection
Peter Forsberg
Remember that scene in The Abyss where Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is dead on the floor and Ed Harris spends an eternity trying to revive her? He pounds on her chest over and over, refusing to give up in his frantic attempt to somehow pummel life into her motionless corpse. That’s exactly how I felt about the Colorado Avalanche. That is, until this past weekend, when the pounding and the hoping all became irrelevant.
I've been beating on the chest of the Avalanche (in a figurative sense) and yelling, “Don’t give up, dammit!” for the last couple months. But unlike Ed Harris, I have now given up the prospect of any resuscitation of the Avs. I’m pulling off my burgundy-and-blue latex gloves and marking the time, because the Avs—now dead fucking last in the NHL Western Conference—have called it a season with mediocre play, shoddy goaltending, and a slew of high-profile injuries that have pretty much guaranteed their sorry ranking. The Western Conference, by the way, hosts such hapless teams as the St. Louis Blues and the atrocious Phoenix Coyotes. The Avs are at the bottom of a very shitty barrel.
The NHL trade deadline arrives on March 4and the Avalanche will be, for the first time since the franchise moved to Denver, “sellers” in the frenzied bonanza leading up to the cutoff to move players. Every year since the Avs came to Denver in 1996, the team has been a “buyer”: shedding unwanted pawns in exchange for knights and bishops, hoping to make the usual deep push toward the Stanley Cup. But those days are long over. The Avs will have to bargain hard at the swap meet on March 4. Look for a trade involving a goalie—that’s the one area in which the team was continually burned this season.
One of the more compelling storylines this season in the Avs’ melodrama was whether the legendary Peter Forsberg was coming back from his native Sweden for another stint in Denver. We now know Forsberg isn’t coming back to the NHL this season. And even if he did, why would he want to come back to a team that’s in last place? Plus, Forsberg appears to be doing just fine on the rarified ice of Scandinivia, as seen in this video, where he scores a nasty goal in his recent debut with his hometown club, MODO.
But even if the great Peter Forsberg walked into the Avalanche locker room right now, the team wouldn’t be able to overcome the nearly ten-point difference in the standings between their place at the bottom and the last playoff spot. The NHL season ends in less than two months—and the Avs, once teetering on the brink, have now plunged into the abyss. At this point, they’re not even worth pounding on anymore.
