Four months ago, the Avalanche was in a death spiral, certain to miss the playoffs and headed for a further major deterioration in its season- ticket base.
On Monday, as he awaited the arrival of left winger Ryan Smyth and defenseman Scott Hannan at the Pepsi Center’s Blue Sky Grill, Kroenke Sports chief marketing officer Paul Andrews was ebullient.
Colorado’s stunning 15-2-2 stretch run rekindled hope; the signings of Smyth and Hannan, and the commitment they showed, built on that.
There are a lot of “ifs” involved, of course, and the Avalanche’s still-suspect goaltending is the major one. But put me down for this: Colorado and Vancouver will be the class of the Northwest Division.
The hard-to-figure Calgary Flames now have the volatile Mike Keenan behind the bench for his 37th coaching chance in the league, and I’m going to assume they’ll underachieve again.
Minnesota has been stagnant, and Edmonton will be awful – continuing a slide that began when the Oilers gave up on closing a relatively small gap in long-term contract negotiations with Smyth and shipped him to the New York Islanders.
The Avalanche’s momentum of last spring has been ratcheted up.
“I don’t have the exact number of calls, but we had eight account executives on the in- house line that comes in all day today where normally we’d only have two,” Andrews said. “This has generated a tremendous amount of interest.”
The Avalanche’s run of “maxing” out on season tickets and having a waiting list is history … at least for the foreseeable future. Andrews said the renewal rate was over 90 percent, but the slippage during the past few years has been significant.
There were huge pockets of seats marked as available for season-ticket purchase at the recent open house, and the Avalanche traditionally has been reluctant to either acknowledge or provide details of that situation.
There is still work to be done to completely win back Colorado fandom, which showed up in significant enough numbers to give the Avs an average attendance that translated into (albeit a frequently papered and discounted) 97.8 percent of capacity.
Smyth is worth the fuss – and, certainly, his $6.25 million cap number – because of his touch and resilience around the net, not to mention his leadership qualities. Whether he ends up playing most often on a line centered by Joe Sakic, his longtime friend and lobbyist for the Colorado cause, or Paul Stastny, he will be interesting to follow.
“That’s for Joel Quenneville to worry about,” Smyth said, smiling. “Or Sakic, if he wants. He runs the team!”
Hannan is a physical defenseman who managed to adapt in the “new” NHL of the post-
lockout world, where mugging no longer worked and suspect skating skills no longer could be overcome, when he was with the San Jose Sharks. Comparing him to former Avalanche defenseman Adam Foote, who has struggled in the transition during his two seasons at Columbus, is a compliment but is also a bit misleading. Unless there is serious backsliding in the standards that have made Foote’s game archaic, the Avalanche doesn’t want Hannan to be Foote.
The way it’s shaping up, all six top Colorado defensemen – Hannan, Karlis Skrastins, Brett Clark, Kurt Sauer, Jordan Leopold and John-Michael Liles – are left shots, so that’s not an issue in pairings. Hannan will be out against the opposing top lines. His partner is up in the air, though it most likely will be Leopold if the Avs choose to keep the efficient tandem of Skrastins and Clark together. (If they don’t, Hannan and Clark would be the major possibility.)
“There are a lot of guys it would be a pleasure to play with,” Hannan said. “It’s a good group of guys, the way they move the puck. … And I think that complements my game very well.”
The potential downside to both deals are not the numbers behind the dollar sign – Hannan’s cap number will be $4.5 million – but the length of the deals. Five years for Smyth, four for Hannan. For all the justified talk about Jose Theodore not delivering anything close to a bang for the buck, at least his deal has only one more year to run. If either of these guys becomes injury riddled, complacent or simply doesn’t deliver, the commitments could be paralyzing.
But in a landscape where the NHL’s general managers came off like a bunch of frenzied middle-aged geeks waiting in line to buy the new Harry Potter book when it went on sale at midnight, that’s what it took.
Staff writer Terry Frei can be reached at 303-954-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com.
