For Tuesday night's game thread photo, I chose the photo above kind of at random. But then I realized that, although the photo isn't that old (March, 2011), none of the players in the picture are still with their respective team. Ryan Stoa is toiling in Cleveland. Dany Heatley is now with Minnesota and Brian Elliott is doing fairly good work for St Louis.
And as I watched the game, I thought back to the first-round playoff meeting of these two clubs way back in 2010 and it occurred to me that many of the guys in Tuesday's game were not around back then. In fact, of the 40 players to dress on Tuesday, just 20 were around when the two squared off just 20 months ago. You could add a couple of injured players to the list, like Doug Murray, Brandon Yip and, sadly. Peter Mueller, but the bottom line is that NHL rosters sure don't stay static for very long.
The Avalanche have played just over 100 games since then and yet only 8 players from Tuesday were around at the end of 2009 - Matt Duchene, Paul Stastny, Ryan O'Reilly, T.J. Galiardi, Milan Hejduk, Cody McLeod, David Jones (who did not play in the series) and the lone defenseman, Kyle Quincey. I honestly don't have any deep profound point to make here, except that I find the turnover amazing. It really makes me wonder who will be on the roster a season or two from now (other than Tyler Bozak and Zach Parise, of course). Oh, and how come I don't remember that Scott Hannan led the team in +/- in the series? Or that Brandon Yip had 4 points? Or that Kyle Cumiskey was an impressive -7?