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The Colorado Avalanche: News from around the NHL - October 15th, 2013

Patrick Smith

The Colorado Avalanche take on the Dallas Stars.

Paced by solid goaltending, the Colorado Avalanche remain focused during their best start since relocating from Quebec 18 years ago.

The Avalanche look to continue their unbeaten streak when they host the Dallas Stars on Tuesday night.

After missing the playoffs the last three seasons, Colorado (5-0-0) joins San Jose and St. Louis as the only NHL teams without a loss. However, first-year coach and Hall-of-Fame goaltenderPatrick Roy does not want to make too much of the team's surprising start.

"We take it one day at a time and just say, `Why not? Why not us?'" said Roy, who helped lead the Avs to Stanley Cup titles in 1996 and 2001. "We're working hard every day. We're humble. We know we're playing against good teams."

There's a massive hockey card collection going on the auction block.

When Simon Bourque was 5 or 6 years old, growing up in Beauce, Que., his parents weren’t too happy when he asked for money to go to the corner store to buy hockey cards.

The family wasn’t well off and they saw this as a waste of money.

“We were a little bit poor,” Bourque recalled. “When you are a young child, you don’t know that, and the passion was there.”

Against his parents’ wishes, Bourque went on buying and collecting. But it’s become a family joke that the hobby turned out very well.

Bourque, now 61 and the president of a civil engineering company in Quebec City, has turned over his vast and rare collection of 400 pre-war hockey cards to a Montreal auction house.

The Oilers have been benching one on their young guys.

As Petr Klima once said, “You need a really long stick to score from the press box.”

Nail Yakupov might laugh at that quote one day, if only he wasn’t so upset about not being able to score with a regulation shaft at ice level.

That’s part of the reason he was a healthy scratch for the first time in his star-studded life Saturday in Toronto, making the 20-year-old Russian doubly frustrated with the start of his highly-anticipated sophomore season.