In his season-and-a-half as the Avalanche’s head coach, Joel Quenneville has tried a variety of approaches with his goaltenders.
Rotating. Yanking at the first sign of shakiness. Calling up a Kazakh from the minors and playing him seemingly until his visa expires. Finally getting David Aebischer back on track and then going along with trading the Swiss goalie for Jose Theodore, the 2002 NHL MVP who had lost both his starting job and his touch at Montreal.
Could you blame Quenneville if he gives up on Theodore?
I wouldn’t.
But in the past few weeks, as the goaltending drama has shown no signs of abating, and we’ve justifiably measured Theodore’s effectiveness (or, more accurately, his ineffectiveness) against his $5.33 million annual salary cap hit through 2007-08, I’ve drifted to the short side, to what probably is a minority view.
The Avalanche should play Theodore for an extended stretch, using Peter Budaj only in one of the games on back-to-back nights, and go into today’s New Year’s matinee operating on the assumption that Theodore will be the No. 1 the rest of the season and through the playoffs.
“You have to take the positive out of every situation and build on it,” Theodore said before the Avalanche departed for a road trip that concludes today at Nashville, where he is scheduled to get the start against the Predators. “I always take a lot of pride in being consistent and making sure every time I’m on the ice for practices and games. I always give the best I can.”
The Avalanche must try to shake Theodore, who hasn’t played since a disastrous outing Wednesday against Dallas, out of both his funk and his denial.
In the salary-cap era, the Avalanche organization has so much riding on Theodore, including reputation, it should look at the long-range picture and the biggest possible upside.
The only way this trade won’t be a disaster is if Theodore flashes back to his periods of elite play, including as recently as the 2004 playoffs.
His problems have been a demoralizing drain on the bench and in the dressing room, regardless of the pro-forma defenses his teammates probably believe by the time they are done talking but forget after the next “soft” goal.
The point is: The Avs are stuck with him.
No organization is going to duplicate what seems to be the Colorado mistake and take both him and his contract. If he’s sitting around as a seldom-used backup through next season, Colorado will have a mess on its hands, and not only because, as the fourth-highest paid goalie in the league, he takes up so much of the available payroll.
The organization says that the standard is the Stanley Cup. That’s praiseworthy. Should the Avs celebrate, or be celebrated for, just making the playoffs? Shoot off fireworks about advancing to the second round before meekly exiting? Have the Avs allowed it to come to that?
If the goal is a championship, the only conceivable way it could happen with this roster is if the Avalanche gets larcenous goaltending of the sort that Jean-Sebastien Giguere gave Anaheim in 2003 or Patrick Roy gave Montreal in 1993 and ’86. That’s one of the NHL’s strengths: Great goaltending can produce startling playoff results.
For the Avalanche, getting that sort of postseason work from Theodore is a long shot – a claiming-horse-in-the-Derby long shot. Maybe you’re even laughing about the audacity of even raising the possibility that he could play that well. Perhaps the paring down of goalie equipment and the other changes in the post-lockout NHL have made it tougher for the slight Theodore. But it’s worth a try. One reason is that Quenne ville’s faith in Budaj isn’t great, either.
Although Quenneville would be choosing the “veteran,” in another sense, it’s along the lines of the decision Mike Shanahan made with Jake Plummer and Jay Cutler. When the Broncos coach said he was going with the quarterback he thought gave him the best chance to win, he wasn’t talking about a midseason home game against the Vikings or even a late-season game needed to clinch the final playoff spot. Shanahan was thinking about Roman numerals.
“We know the importance of strong goaltending,” Quenneville said the other day after practice in Centennial. “It translates into stronger team play. … But I think that awareness of the team being distracted by who’s in net is something everybody is aware of, and it is not an issue.”
The Avalanche has a chance if, and only if, Theodore plays like a $5.33 million-a-season goalie. This was a risky deal from the start, far harder to justify than the no-brainer one for Roy, and it very well could go down as one of the most boneheaded trades in NHL history. But by making it, the Avs were saying they were smarter than everyone else, and they were going to live or die with Theodore.
They might as well ride it out – and hope they have the last laugh.
Staff writer Terry Frei can be reached at 303-954-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com.
