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Sunday Week in Review Thread 7/26/15

By earl06
Candice Ward-USA TODAY Sports

Good morning all. As the summer doldrums deepen and the news gets thinner and thinner, we still strive to keep you up to date here at MHH. Here's a sampling of this week's highlights:

- The Avalanche and Fort Wayne Komets renewed their affiliation this week, this time for 2 years. I still think it benefits the K's far more than it benefits the Avs org the way it's set up but I guess you'll have that unless you buy an ECHL franchise outright. Side note: The Colorado Eagles are still unaffiliated along with Rapid City, Tulsa and Wichita and Winnipeg & New Jersey are the only NHL clubs without an ECHL affiliation.

- The 2015 Colorado Avalanche Charity Golf Classic is set for Tuesday, Sept. 15, at The Ridge at Castle Pines North. This fell during rookie camp last season and I bet it will again. We can start to get a feeling for training camp dates now. Rookie camp should be something like 9/13 - 9/15, returning player physicals on the 16th or 17th with camp opening the next day and the first pre-season game on Tuesday the 22nd. Only 7 weeks away! WOW!

- The beloved Rampage announced their pre-season schedule this week, a pair of dates against the Texas Stars, Friday and Sunday October 2nd & 4th. Doing a little more schedule inferring leads me to believe that AHL training camp will open around September 28th but as in the past players cut from the Avs would head there as they are notified for Captain's Practices. My guess is first cuts will come somewhere around the 21st.

- The Avs announced a slate of 20th Anniversary dates this week for the upcoming season:
10/8 - Opening Night vs You Know Who
12/7 - 20th Anniversary Team Night, also vs You Know Who
2/27 - Stadium Series game vs detroit
...and a bunch of others like Museum Night which I don't understand yet but I'm sure will be explained in the future.

- The good folks at Eurolanche just published an interview with Calvin Pickard which I would highly recommend reading. Picks had this to say about his contract status:

"Of course, I love everything about Colorado and my priority is to stay there. The contract things are kinda out of my hands and I can't really worry about that."

Hopefully whoever does have it in their hands gets a move on. This is one contract situation that's worried me since the season ended. I doubt the two sides are very far apart but like I've said before, Calvin probably wants some sort of confirmation from the Avs that he's an important part of plans going forward.

- Speaking of goalies, Max Pajpach confirmed via twitter that he's on his way back to Tappara in Finland to begin pre-season training. Last year he was slated to play for their Under-20 team but missed the entire campaign with a knee injury.

- Carl Soderberg is pretty stoked to be with the Avs and "when Joe (Sakic) and Patrick (Roy) said they were interested in me, I wanted to go to Colorado right away," The Yeti is in Malmo training right now but plans to come to Denver in late August to set up shop and meet everybody.

- Young Conner Bleackley knows he needs to work on his skating to get to the NHL level. Besides the work at Dev Camp with Avs Consultant Tracy Tutton, Bleacks spent the week with Dynamic Edge skating in Kelowna to keep the improvement rolling. You can check out a little of his camp here on YouTube.

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That's all for now. I'll leave you with this from fishing BFFs Dutch & Winch.