Avs Defeat the Less than Mighty Ducks

On the night when the Ducks debuted their new third jersey, which brings back the original Mighty Ducks logo, they played like a team that would have Emilio Estevez cringing behind the coach’s bench. Coming into the game the Ducks only had one goal for the season, and thanks to the strong netminding and defense by the Avs, they held them to that.

After such a horrific loss on Wednesday night, it is hard to tell if the Avs are that much better of a team, or if Anaheim is just that bad. But the facts don’t lie. The Avs have out hit their opponents and had more blocked shots in all their games so far. We have the highest ranked power play, are among the highest scoring team, and Beauchemin leads the league in blocked shots. That’s a lot of league leaders for a team that barely looked like they could beat a high school team against the Bruins.

All of the games that the Avs have played so far have each varied so much, it is hard to tell exactly what kind of team we have, but at least we can generate goals and offense, once we can get it out of our zone. The fact that we have struggled so severely getting the puck out of the zone, would also be a factor for our high amount of blocked shots. The Avs had more blocked shots than the Ducks had on goal tonight. The team we have now is much more different than the Avs of yore. We are no longer the crisp and flashy team, but have more grit and toughness.

Perhaps the game on Sunday against the Kings will give us some sense of normalcy and we can start to see exactly what type of team we are dealing with. And props to Berra for his second career shutout with 35 saves tonight.