Boods in net. I threw Boods under the bus after last night’s game, and am not backing down. But I will say, he was not the reason the team lost last night. So calm down, Boods lovers. But his saves percentage is .899. The numbers are the numbers, folks.
-The above taken from Adrian Dater's latest blog scribblings.
Well, then count the above as Reason #4,398 why much-maligned management was correct to let Theo walk: Jose "Dater's Off-season Man-Crush" Theodore's save percentage is 0.889, on a better team. His GAA is also worse than Budaj's: 3.08 vs. 2.84. He has more wins because he has more goal support. Period, end of story. If the stalwart among you will recall, Dater said that letting Benedict Theodore walk for what he considered pennies was a mistake. Repeatedly. I think this season so far has shown that it wasn't. Remember how Dater's boyfriend DD mentioned that the Avs have played a ton of one-goal games? You don't? Look here. Now then, where was I? Ohh yeah, Dater is wrong. With Theo in net, we'd be staring up at the Kings in the standing and close to catching the Blues and Isles for the Tavares sweepstakes.
The 'broken' part of this team (i.e. the one that does need fixing) is the O and the D, with coaching thrown in for seasoning. Not addressing the supposed "goaltending deficiency" wasn't a mistake by the front office. Not addressing the one-hit wonders like Salei on D, the apparently unfounded faith in some of the young players and Arny to replace Bruno's scoring, signing Tucker, and handing the reins to Tony G. can all be laid at management's feet as bad calls.
Dater and his fans can stick to their opinion that Boods is large part of the problem, but a different goaltender for this team won't even begin to be a tiny part of the solution. This is a mediocre team when healthy, and a horrible team when unmotivated and missing key players. Giggy needs to call GM GM in Washington and get the short version of the rebuild process and implement step #1 post-haste: If you wanna get good, you've got to be really bad for a little bit.
I fully endorse that by the way. Tell Sakic to get healthy, see if Forsberg can do the same, deal some guys like Salei and Clark for prospects, get Speedy up from the Monsters to take his lumps for the rest of this season, keep Arny on the third line where he belongs and unload him at the end of this season, resign Lappy, Guite, Budaj, Jones, McLeod, and Leoprone ,and then go after two or three of the following: Bouwmeester, Morris, Zetterberg, Franzen, Kotalik, Komisarek, Koistinen, McDonald, Gionta, Cammalleri, Tanguay, and the Sedin Twins. I'd also take a look at what would have to be given up to get Matt Hunwick out of Boston as an RFA next year. Give me something to look forward to, other than being the "also-rans" every year.