Morning Flurries: Avalanche redemption and Winter Classic jerseys

The Avalanche need to turn things around, and soon.

After the slate of games on Thursday, the Avalanche have dropped to fifth in an ultra-competitive Central Division, as Dallas and Minnesota both took home wins. They stayed in the second Wild Card spot as the Edmonton Oilers dropped their third straight in a tilt against Florida (and luckily for Colorado, they’re the next team on the floundering Edmonton roster’s schedule) but they’re now statistically dead even with Anaheim and Edmonton, and just two points ahead of the Arizona Coyotes, Vegas Golden Knights, and Chicago Blackhawks.

Colorado dropped a disappointing rematch against Nashville on Wednesday, and if you want a refresher we’ve got you covered. [Mile High Hockey]

For now, they remain in NHL.com’s Top 16 rankings, but they’ll need to win in their next game to keep that up. [NHL.com]

Speaking of their next game, they face off against the other Wild Card team on Friday, which is going to be wild.

It’s a fun matchup between Nathan MacKinnon and Mark Scheifele to boot, and the Jets forward is thrilled about it. [Winnipeg Sun]

And now, around the league:

The Boston Bruins got their butts pounded right into the ground by the Vancouver Canucks on Thursday night, dropping a horrific 8-5 decision to the rebuilding club.

The Chicago Blackhawks also lost a tough one on Thursday, painfully falling 4-3 against Teuvo Teravainen, Scott Darling, Trevor van Riemsdyk, and the Carolina Hurricanes in their first game post-Joel Quenneville.

Both both teams did have at least one bright moment apiece on Thursday, as they revealed their Winter Classic jerseys:

The Blackhawks color scheme is one of the best in the NHL and every Classic outdoor jersey should be made with cream accents, so I hate the Chicago ones from the very depths of my soul.

Apparently I’m alone on that, though, which is ok I guess. Not everyone can have good taste!

To learn more about those black-and-white-cookie-wannabes, here’s a primer on the sweater design. [Second City Hockey]

Finally, thank you to the LA Kings. This isn’t an easy thing for a hockey team to come out and do, but this is the kind of move that should be pretty easy to support:

A reminder: the United States owns nearly half of all civilian-owned guns in the entire world, and outpace the second highest nation in civilian gun ownership (India, if you were wondering) by roughly 800%.

The US is also far from the worst offender in gun deaths, but they sit in the top six. And the only country with more reported gun deaths than the United States in 2016 was Brazil. And while the US pales in comparison to the other five of the world’s deadliest gun death countries when it comes to homicides alone, it remains a uniquely stark victim of suicide deaths — and is the only developed nation in the top six leaderboard.

Enough.