Bruins vs. Avalanche 10/16/24 PREVIEW: Mile High Matchup

Just the Facts

• The Time: Wednesday, 9:30pm PT
• The Place: Ball Arena, Denver, Colorado
• Place to Watch: TNT, MAX, TruTV
• Place to Listen: 98.5 The Sports Hub
• An Opposing Viewpoint: Mile High Hockey

Know Your Enemy

• The Avalanche have yet to register a win this season; being 0-3-0
• Three players are shouldering most of the load for points-getting and goalscoring; Cale Makar, Mikko Rantanen, and Nathan McKinnon. All have four points.
• If there’s a smoking gun for the Avs’ woes; it’s one of two things. One of whom is injuries; they’re missing Devon Toews, Calvin De Haan, Val Nichushkin, Tucker Poolman, Jonathan Drouin, and Artturi Lehkonen, as well as Gabriel Landeskog; who’s been dealing with knee issues. That is a lot of talent away from Burgundy and Blue.
• The other big woe-bringer for the Avs is their goaltending, which has been spectacularly wretched to start the season. Neither goaltender, Justus Annunen and Alex Giorgiev, has a SV% above .800 at the moment. It is bad out there in Colorado.

Game Preview:

Well well well, guess this whole “stay competitive” thing turned out to be pretty hard for everybody, now didn’t it?

The Avs are in an unusual spot for themselves right now in that they are just…really, really bad. They have a good portion of their impact players either out on the mend or just indisposed of, their goaltending may as well be a shooter tutor, and while their remaining big names can still be difference makers, the runaway effect of their weak depth combined with their bad goaltending combined with their painful injury luck has them scraping the bottom of the Central Division’s barrel. Not an auspicious start at all for Colorado.

That said, don’t get comfortable with the prospect of an easy win. Colorado has lost their games miserably, but they will make you work for it.

While it’s still early on, Colorado is still one of the better teams at getting shots to the net and pretty quality ones at that. Boston will have to do something that they’ve struggled early on with and clamp the net-front down from Colorado’s big names if they want to keep this from turning into another boat race of a game. The time for defensive SNAFUs and offensive zone board battle carelessness is over.

Should make for an interesting matchup either way, so let’s go B’s!