Looking over the year's healthy scratches and marveling at Zannon's glaring absence on that list has, somehow, lost its magic for me. So I decided to see if I couldn't generate some intelligent and viable theories about why this keeps occurring. After I spend thirty seconds on that, I shall move on to snarky and entertaining theories. Feel free to join in:

1) Joe Sacco's metric for player performance involves only one thing: effort. Since Zannon has a tiny fraction of the talent of anyone else on the team, the fact that he is half as good makes him a massive over-acheiver.

2) He seems like a nice guy.

3). . . . . uh. . .

Moving on to snark

1) Greg Sherman, stumbling around the set of a Capital One "What's in Your Wallet?" commercial, reveling in the combination of two of his favorite things: beards and saving money has an epiphany. Tired of being a boring, logical, accounting-focused billboard for mediocre GMitude, and inspired by his faux pagan surroundings, Sherman goes 180 degrees the other way, woes Zannon from commercial cast and signs him to a ridiculous contract.

Why? you ask.

Zannon was intended to be Greg Sherman's willing sacrifice to the hockey gods. By overpaying him and having him throw himself (slowly) [the Greek verb "to slowly throw" IS ACTUALLY zannus] in front of every puck he could catch up to, Sherman hoped to sacrifice Zannon and his significant salary to the gods and thus protect more valuable assets.

The hockey gods incensed at the poor quality of Sherman's sacrifice, refused his offering and decided to mete out their punishment on the Avs competent players instead. They came to Sherman in a vision and told them that his punishment would be to watch all of them suffer while Zannon would have to play EVERY SINGLE GAME.

That's my theory. Yours?

Zannon's excessive salary and shot-blocking propensity were signed as an intended sacrifice to the hockey gods in order to keep more valued players off the injury list.