When I’m asked what it’s like to cover a bad NHL team, I point out that I’ve had a lot of experience at it.
With the Colorado Rockies.
I was young, new in the business, wide-eyed and grateful for the opportunity to be on a major-league beat.
For the final five seasons of the Rockies’ six seasons in Colorado, through the team’s move to New Jersey in 1982, I chronicled the circus that was Denver’s first shot in the NHL. Through three ownerships and other near-sales and near-moves. Through a bunch of coaches — most notably, the bombastic Don Cherry. Through dizzying personnel changes that included the franchise’s best players being traded, often for each other. And through fluctuating attendance in McNichols Sports Arena that at least gave promise that given a decent team, the NHL could draw in Denver.
I can admit this now, too, but in the time before teams flew on chartered planes, being part of the traveling party on commercial flights and team buses, and at hotels, developed a more genial and familiar relationship between scribes and players, coaches and team personnel. The same was true when I next covered the Nuggets.
The Rockies’ major problem was a lack of a consistent, focused long-range approach, with moves often made out of panic as the latest ownership lamented the red ink. In early November 1979, for example, with the Rockies and Cherry desperate for scoring, they traded away the very type of cornerstone, intimidating young defenseman the Avalanche now would love to have, sending to the for five players. I had been told Beck was untouchable, and I think the Rockies believed it … virtually right up untll they traded him. (The young reporter learned: Nobody’s untouchable…no matter what anyone says.) In late December, the Rockies sent star winger Wilf Paiement and Pat Hickey, acquired from the Rangers in the Beck deal, to the for Lanny McDonald and a young defenseman named Joel Quenneville.
And then two seasons later, they shipped McDonald to Calgary for forwards Bobby MacMillian and Don Lever. McDonald was tearful about the trade, emotionally saying goodbye on the team bus and hearing defenseman Rob Ramage tell him to knock it off because the trade would turn out to be the greatest thing that ever happened to him. (It was.)
I was reminded of this early last season, when the Avalanche brought in notable ex-Rockies for a game and paid tribute to Colorado hockey history.
McDonald and Paiement, who sat next to each other in Rockies jerseys as they signed autographs on the concourse, both wore No. 9.
Just like .
The most wins the Rockies ever had in a season was 22. They made the playoffs only once in their six seasons here, going 19-40-21 in 1977-78, getting in as the final team in a field that included 12 of the league’s 17 franchises, and losing two straight in an entertaining mini-series with the Flyers. With Paiement and Beck leading the way, that actually was an overachieving team, enjoyable to cover under Pat Kelly, a long-time minor-league coach getting his first crack at anything in the NHL. (Sound familiar?)
After that, the Rockies became the standard for bad hockey, though they always had enough decent (and better) players sprinkled on the roster to tantalize that maybe better days were ahead.
The catch in analyzing the Rockies’ records is that the NHL played 80-game seasons — two fewer games than now — and if a game was tied at the end of the third period, that was it. No overtime. No shootout. No three-point games. So to draw comparisons with the dumpster fire that now is the 2016-17 Avalanche requires projections. I assumed (nicely) that in roughly half the ties, the Rockies would have gotten a game’s third point in an overtime or shootout. Next, I added one more point to the total to account for two more games.
Under those projections, the Rockies’ worst total would have been 49 points, in 1978-79. (In actuality, they were 15-53-12.)
After the Avs snapped a nine-game losing streak with a 5-2 win over Winnipeg on Saturday, they were 14-33-2. Saying they are “on pace” for anything is risky because they got off to a decent 9-9 start before the slide began, but that record (with subjective rounding off) projects out to roughly 23-56-3 and 49 points.
At this pace, they’re threatening to be worse than the worst of Rocky Hockey.
And that’s saying something.
COLORADO ROCKIES
| Season | Record | Points | Projected Points* |
| 1976-77 | 20-46-14 | 54 | 62 |
| 1977-78 | 19-40-21 | 59 | 70 |
| 1978-79 | 15-53-12 | 42 | 49 |
| 1979-80 | 19-48-13 | 51 | 58 |
| 1980-81 | 22-45-13 | 57 | 64 |
| 1981-82 | 18-49-13 | 49 | 56 |
| * This was the regulation tie era in 80-game seasons. Projected points charitably assumes Rockies would have gained a second point in three-point games in an overtime or a shootout roughly half the time. Then one more point is added to the total to take two additional games in an 82-game season into account. | |||
