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Yahoo Sports is running an Emoji Preview, the Avs are up.
The Potential Best Thing About This Team
MacKinnon. The sky’s the limit for this center, who made Paul Stastny expendable. His 10 points in seven playoff games showed he might be able to carry this club for stretches.
The Potential Worst Thing About This Team
The defense. It yielded 32.7 shots per game, and needed Varlamov’s tremendous season to cover up its flaws. The blue line doesn’t look great on paper, again; if any part of this team gets exposed this season, one assumes it’s the defense.
Sakic and Roy don't need fancy stats.
Well, at least Avs GM Joe Sakic and head coach Patrick Roy seem steadfast in doing things their way, as this great piece from Yahoo’s Nick Cotsonika illustrates.
The Avs think stats like Corsi (percentage of shot attempts), Fenwick (percentage of unblocked shot attempts) and PDO (combined shooting and save percentage) do not accurately reflect their performance.
In short, they believe in shot quality, and their system is designed around it.
For anyone who’s followed the "old guard" versus "stat nerd" debates, the words "shot quality" produce a here-we-go-again feeling. Bloggers (including many who became future team employees when the smoke cleared) tore through these shot quality arguments over the past few years and then watched as last year’s Leafs and the 2011-12 Minnesota Wild regressed as predicted.
Could Colorado buck this growing trend?
The Hockey Writers features an article about Lappy. You know, It's All About Lappy.
Ian Laperriere never really struck fear in his opponents’ hearts in the goal scoring department. But the 18-year veteran more than made up for his lack of scoring with stout defense, and the kind of toughness that makes sandpaper seem like cotton.
"I think my style of play is why fans connected, the way I played the game," Laperriere recalled. "I was physical, played hurt, played the way Flyers fans are. They’re blue-collared people who work hard for their money. When they see the same guy who works hard on the ice they connect.
"It was a short time. That was one of my only regrets, it was so short. Wish I could have played here in my mid-twenties, more of a chance to show what I could have done."