The New Jersey Devils haven’t played in Denver since Nov. 30, 2003.
Is that any way to salute their roots as the Colorado Rockies from 1976-82?
They finally will be back Saturday, when they face the Avalanche at the Pepsi Center.
At most Avalanche games and even practices, I spot fans wearing Colorado Rockies replica jerseys. (One of these days, I might even spot an even more drastic “retro” jersey, honoring the franchise’s first two seasons as the Kansas City Scouts.)
Kroenke Sports taps into the nostalgia by selling the Rockies jerseys in the Pepsi Center, and it’s not uncommon to spot a No. 22 Rockies jersey in town with the name on the back of a defenseman acquired from the Toronto Maple Leafs during the 1979-80 season.
That was a fellow named Joel Quenneville.
The Rockies were here in another era. The top ticket price at the end of their stay was $14, and even allowing for inflation, that’s mind-boggling 30 years later. They didn’t draw well at McNichols Sports Arena, but the most games they won in any of their six seasons was 22. On a treadmill because of ownership changes and pressures to try to get better fast, the Rockies kept trading the few marquee players they had — for other marquee players or multiplayer packages.
But the major reason so many seem to remember the Rockies with fondness was that, well, in retrospect the trials and travails seem to have gained legendary status.
If you were a Rockies’ fan, you were in an exclusive club. And to this day, you’re convinced that if that franchise ever had become decent on the ice, there would have been no need for the Rockies to become the Devils and that the baseball franchise would have been called the Grizzlies.
Since they moved to New Jersey, the Rockies have thrived.
But only competitively.
The way things are shaping up in the NHL’s Eastern Conference, it’s entirely possible that the fans in the Pepsi Center on Saturday will be getting a look at one of this season’s Stanley Cup finalists.
In this decade, the Devils lost to the Avalanche in the 2001 Finals, and then beat Anaheim in 2003 to claim the Cup, and they might be the East’s last team standing again this year. There are no guarantees, of course, given the Penguins’ ascendancy and the possibility that the Senators might reawaken, but New Jersey just won’t go away.
As maddening as Devils president and general manager Lou Lamoriello’s flightiness can be — among other things, he changes coaches at the drop of a puck and has heavy influences on such things as the NHL’s absurd scheduling policies — there is no denying his genius and adaptability as a shaper of an on-ice product.
Martin Brodeur, destined to overhaul Patrick Roy as the league’s all-time winning goalie, keeps going strong, and Zach Parise — the former University of North Dakota star and son of one-time Minnesota North Stars winger J.P. Parise — is staking out a claim as one of the top young forwards in the league.
One of the ironies is that when John McMullen bought the Rockies and moved them to New Jersey, the party line — expressed at the celebratory 1982 news conference I attended in the new Meadowlands arena, just on the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel from Manhattan — was that they were moving to a true hockey territory and would be perennial sellouts. The Devils had such disdain for the franchise’s early days, they pretended as if the Scouts and Rockies hadn’t even existed when chronicling franchise records and histories.
The joke was on Jersey.
Attendance was unimpressive, even in the championship seasons, and the Devils finally fled the East Rutherford swamps for the new Prudential Center in downtown Newark this season. I haven’t made it to a game there yet, but I’m told it’s one of the best — if not the best — buildings in the NHL.
Despite the building and the team’s performance, the Devils still are averaging barely over 15,000 and about 87 percent capacity at home this season, leaving them in the bottom third of the league.
Colorado is a better hockey territory than New Jersey.
So when some Avalanche fans wear those Rockies jerseys Saturday, it won’t just be nostalgia. It can be a taunt.
SPOTLIGHT ON . . .
Jose Theodore, goalie, Avalanche
A year ago, it seemed likely that the Avalanche would buy out the final year of Theodore’s contract, and that he wouldn’t be with Colorado this season, much less next season.
The Avalanche stuck with him, in part because he had reacted with a good-soldier attitude to his backup status to Peter Budaj last winter.
Now, it’s entirely reasonable to wonder if the Avalanche will be able to re-sign him when the three-year, $16-million deal expires after this season.
Theodore last week said he didn’t even want to ponder the possibilities.
“You want to talk contract when things are not going well,” Theodore said. “When things are going well, that’s the last thing you worry about. I’m having fun with the guys, I’m enjoying every moment, every practice, every game. I’m going to leave that up to my agent.”
After he had 25 saves in the Avalanche’s 3-1 victory over Dallas on Saturday, his numbers in the 2008 calendar year were a 1.98 goals-against average and a .928 save percentage in 25 games.
The tricky part of this is whether the Avalanche, in the cap era, literally can afford to consider his post-Christmas rejuvenation to be confirmation that he: a) is back at the top of his game; and, more important, b) can stay there through another long-term deal for as much as, or even anything close to, what he made under the contract he signed with the Canadiens.
The answers are incomplete.
That’s why Theodore has so much at stake down the stretch and in the playoffs, if the Avalanche gets that far. In no way does it denigrate Theodore’s professionalism to say that Colorado needs to keep dangling that next contract carrot in front of him as this plays out.
The other day, for about the 37th time this season, I asked Theodore if he felt he was back at the top of his game.
“If you look from the end of December to now, it’s pretty much the best streak of games I’ve had, stats-wise,” he said.
He won the Hart Trophy for the 2001-02 season, and he had a 2.11 goals-against average and a .931 save percentage in 67 games. That also was in the obstruction era, so it’s arguable that this Theodore stretch in the post-lockout game in some ways measures up.
But can he keep it up?
