Bruins vs. Avalanche 10/16/24 PREVIEW: Mile High Matchup

Just the facts

• The time: Wednesday, 9:30 p.m. PT
• The place: Ball Arena, Denver, Colorado
• Place to watch: TNT, MAX, TruTV
• Place to listen: 98.5 The Sports Center
• An opposing point of view: Mile High Hockey

Know your enemy

• The Avalanche have yet to win this season; be 0-3-0
• Three players bear the brunt of collecting points and goals; Cale Makar, Mikko Rantanen and Nathan McKinnon. Everyone has four points.
• If there's any smoking gun to the Avs' woes; It's one of two things. One of them is injuries; Missing are Devon Toews, Calvin De Haan, Val Nichushkin, Tucker Poolman, Jonathan Drouin and Artturi Lehkonen as well as Gabriel Landeskog; who deals with knee problems. That is a much of talent beyond burgundy and blue.
• The other big woe for the Avs is their goaltending, which was spectacularly abysmal to start the season. Neither goaltender, Justus Annunen and Alex Giorgiev, currently has an SV% above .800. It is bad out there in Colorado.

Game preview:

Well, I guess the whole “competitiveness” thing has proven pretty difficult for everyone, hasn’t it?

The Avs are in an unusual situation right now in that they just…really, Really bad. They have a good portion of their impact players either on the mend or just out of sorts, their goalkeeper might as well be a goalscoring teacher, and while their remaining big names can still make the difference, the one that's out of control is out of control Effect of their weak depth combined with their poor goaltending combined with their painful luck with injuries has resulted in them falling to the bottom of the Central Division. It's not a promising start at all for Colorado.

However, you shouldn't be satisfied with the prospect of an easy victory. Colorado lost their games miserably, but they will Make yourself work for it.

Even though it's early days, Colorado is still one of the better teams when it comes to putting shots on net, and pretty good ones at that. Boston needs to do something it struggled with early on and let Colorado's big names get to the front of the net if it doesn't want to turn into another boat race of a game. The time for defensive SNAFUs and carelessness in attack zone board combat is over.

Either way it should make for an interesting match, so let's play B's!