#avs lore

well my friend, during the 2017 global series games in stockholm--which the avs both lost against the sens and matt duchene, who had just been traded midgame the night before they left and immediately had to get on a plane and play them, despite the best efforts of stockholm native gabe landeskog--alexander kerfoot (now of the leafs pour one out) was a new member of team and lived in rookie house with josty (😔) jt, and chris bigras (pour one out for all this as well) and was known primarily to the fans for his harvard economics education.

the way he tells it, the morning they got to sweden they had a free day, and his iphone wasn't working so he left the team hotel to go by himself to an apple store, where they took his phone and left him to entertain himself in a foreign country. so he found a little sandwich shop, and with some difficulty ordered a pesto sandwich from the swedish proprietors, without knowing that pesto contains pine nuts, to which kerfy is extremely allergic.

well, imagine you're a former first overall whose career, already dogged by people criticizing the fact that you decided to go to college for a year on your mom's advice, is derailed by a terrible accident with a golf cart and traded unceremoniously, and you manage to shape up enough to become the number one dman on a team with a swedish teenager right out of a boyband for a captain, the mouthy son of a disgraced former team owner, and another first overall blessed by crosby himself who walks in the first day and demands everyone calls him the dogg, 2 gs. you fall in love with this team, because how can you not? then, during a season that was already turning out terrible, you break your leg on the ice, and your team's top center takes one look at it and demands a trade the next day.

a year and a half later, people are saying you're getting older and that you're injury prone, and that guy's still there, too cowardly to even dress with the rest of you and your team is getting over the worst season in franchise history. one day, he's traded mid-game, and you meet who they traded for after a ten hour flight to stockholm: a tiny, exhausted little french boy with a tenuous grasp of english and who skates like he's dancing. this boy becomes the steady partner you haven't had in years, your rookie and your stallmate, complementing you on the ice, and blowing up your instagram off it, calling each other paul and freddie after you see bohemian rhapsody with no sense of irony, and above all, over and over again, "mon chummmmmmmmmm."

that's the story of sam and ej, plain and simple.

this story, like a lot of stories in hockey, starts with sidney crosby. 

in 2005, a year after a lockout, sidney crosby was the Next One, the boy from cole harbour made good, and the sidney crosby lottery was a heartwrenching battle of luck and odds, a spectacle that the penguins won, and they have three cups for their trouble. when sidney crosby was drafted, the only question was that who could follow. this story isn’t about crosby, really. 

this story is about his shadow. 

in 2006, the year after crosby was drafted, erik johnson was a dynamic defenseman fresh out of catholic school in minnesota tearing up the usntdp and earning two straight gold medals at the wjcs. nathan mackinnon was another boy from cole harbour, watching his hero put nova scotia on the map, and wanted to be right there with him. he’s going to be a hockey player. he has no other plan.

ej was drafted by the perennially cup-hungry st. louis blues in 2006, the first american-born defenseman to go first overall. in hindsight, the 2006 draft class was exceptionally stacked, producing players players like jordan staal, jonathan toews, nicklas backstrom, phil kessel, claude giroux, and brad marchand. and at the very top, the first overall: erik johnson. 

ej, no matter where he went, was committed to the university of minnesota, set to be a golden gopher on the advice of his mother. but then, no first overall goes to college, right? no first overall defers their chance at the nhl. but ej does, spends his freshman year in college, and becomes the first top draft pick to go to college in 44 years. hockey pundits questioned it, and the blues’ decision to let him, instead of throwing him into the fire the way every other first overall would before and after him, but he went. 

a season later, ej has his rookie season and it’s...fine. he puts up 33 points in 69 (nice) games, respectable for any high end dman, and his third highest point total of his career. but for a first overall? in a draft class like his? was it the right choice? was he worth it? the questions mount, and come to a head in 2008, when ej crashes a golf cart during a team party, and tears the ligaments in his knee. the official team statement is that his foot got caught between the pedals of the cart and twisted wrong. all the gossip around the league knew that he was drunk. 

he comes back the next season blazing, setting a career high in points, and the next year he wins a silver medal at the olympics, but the damage was done, to his knee and his relationship with the blues. his injuries flare up, and he puts up less and less points, his playmaking ability and defensive smarts are questioned more and more. in january of 2011, ej gets hit in the face with a puck during practice, knocking out several of his front teeth. two weeks later, he’s traded to the colorado avalanche. 

he’s given a swedish underwear model for a roommate and a captain, and a chance to be the number one defenseman for a team that needs him, and he takes them both. 

the consensus among hockey media was clear: if it weren’t for nail yakupov, erik johnson would be the worst first overall draft bust since rick dipietro. 

two years later, in 2013, the other boy from cole harbour is all grown up. rocketing through shattucks, and running roughshod over the qmjhl (to the point where he refused to play for the team that drafted him because he didn’t speak french, instead opting to play for his hometown halifax mooseheads), leading the mooseheads to their first memorial cup. nate is finally good enough that crosby takes notice of him, and he beats out seth jones to be selected first overall to the colorado avalanche.

he walks into the locker room and demands they all call him dogg, after his other hero, nate dogg. he has a rookie season that earns him the calder, and the first taste of playoff hockey for them both. and then, for the next few seasons, nate starts to regress. the team around them starts to breakdown, chafe under the aggressive coaching style of patrick roy. all through it, nate can look to ej, the team’s other first overall, earning his way back into hockey’s good graces. 

in 2015, ej matches his career high in points and gets selected to be the avalanche’s representative at the all star game in columbus. and like every other time he’s set to hold the world on his shoulders, his knees buckle under its weight. right before the all star game, he gets injured again, and replaced by another rookie first overall, the panthers’ aaron ekblad. 

and then comes 16-17, the worst season in franchise history, their coach abandoning them. they lose, and lose, and lose. ej gets his worst injury yet, breaking his leg, and duchene loses faith. nate hits his lowest point, frustrated and mortified, to the point that he sees staff waving at them at the rink, and all he can see is their disappointment, their embarrassment. people talk about ripping the team apart and setting fire to the remains, trading gabe, trading everybody. the leadership team, including nate and ej, refuse to give up on themselves. 

nate changes his workouts, his diet, starts seeing a sports therapist. he becomes one of the best players in the league, one of the best players in the world, dragging his team with him to the top. he’s a hockey player, and that’s all he knows how to do, and he refuses to let them call him a bust. 

ej has been an av almost five times longer than he was a blue, and he has been their unquestioned number one defenseman for years. as he’s gotten older he’s stepped back, focused on helping the younger, faster dmen who would replace him, but is just as capable of throwing himself back in when he’s needed. he’s broken, over and over again, but every time, he’s put himself back together with a toothless smile and a quip for good measure. he’s taken all the people who wrote him off, and built a career for himself, despite everything. despite everything, he’s still him. 

how do i begin to describe someone like patrick roy? patrick roy is a violent, temperamental egotist whose lionizing represents some of the worst impulses of hockey’s id. he is a control freak who was simultaneously short-sighted and stubborn as he was capable of innovating the game itself. he is one of the best goalies in the history of the colorado avalanche, if not the league itself, and acting in spite of him has turned this team into who they are today. 

above all, patrick roy is an asshole that thrives on dramatic exits.

roy’s history with the avalanche starts with his last game as a hab, against the detroit red wings, december 2, 1995. roy already had a contentious relationship with the habs’ coach, mario tremblay, and when he let in five goals in the first period and four more in the second until tremblay would pull him, roy took it as what it was: public humilation. there, on the bench, he declared he would play his last game as a canadien. four days later, he got his wish, and was traded to the colorado avalanche. 

roy would become the best goalie in avalanche history, winning two stanley cups with them and earning their franchise record in wins. along the way, after getting pulled in a tied game in anaheim against the ducks, roy went into the visiting coach’s office and smashed it up with his stick, destroying video equipment in the midst of his tantrum, and threatening the then coach, bob hartley, to never do it again. after this, the reporter who broke this story tells that roy cornered him in a parking lot, accusing him of running it to make him look bad before the avs went to montreal, and punched him in the face. 

roy was also accused of other violent acts during his career. in 1997, roy was arrested after threatening and allegedly attacking a dj at a bar in colorado springs. in 2000, during a fight with his wife, roy ripped two doors off their hinges and was tried for domestic violence and destruction of property, dropped due to his wife’s lack of desire for conviction, and the two would divorce in 2005. 

after a game 7 ot loss against the wild in the 2003 playoffs, roy immediately retired, and the goalie would become a coach. 

after retirement, roy buys his own little castle in the q, and becomes owner, gm, vice president of hockey ops, and head coach of the quebec remparts. he’s involved in at least one other violent altercation, charged by the co-owner of the remparts with throwing punches, and inciting his son jonathan into fighting another team’s goalie without the other goalie’s agreement. his team loses the 2012 qmjhl playoffs against the halifax mooseheads lead by nathan mackinnon, and the remparts goaltender louis domingue, who roy blamed for the loss, recounts that roy is “worst person [he has] ever met.”

following this in 2013, roy is named head coach and vice president of hockey ops, as an additional concession for taking the job, for the colorado avalanche, sharing player-personnel decisions with his former teammate, joe sakic. 

roy as a coach was as erratic and dramatic as he was as a person. in his first game as avs coach, he gets in a shouting match with bruce boudreau, then with the anaheim ducks, and almost knocks over the partition between benches, getting fined $10k for his actions. he starts the practice of pulling the goalie at 3 minutes, setting the standard for pulling the goalie today, with insane moves like pulling the goalie at 10 minutes.  he publicly rips into his star center, matt duchene, for celebrating too ebulliently in a losing game.

during all this, roy butts heads with sakic and the rest of the organization over who had the final decision in player decisions. this all comes to a head in the summer of 2016, when roy questioned sakic on a number of decisions like trading nick holden to the rangers, whose trade lead roy to personally call alain vigneault to congratulate him on what he had gotten. however, it was tyson barre that was the last straw for roy. 

in the summer of 2016, tyson barrie was part of the avs’ young core, and one of  the brightest spots on their blueline, despite his issues on defense. tyson is a contentious player, to say the least, and his contract negotiations broke down to the point where he became one of the few players to enter into an actual arbitration hearing. the hearing was, by all accounts, vicious and grueling in its assesment. roy was strongly against keeping tyson, thinking of him as a 5th dman, and strongly preferring a stronger, bigger defenseman. when tyson signed a contract with the avs before the arbitrator made her ruling, roy did what he does best: he threw a tantrum, took his toys, and went home. 

two weeks after tyson signs with the team, roy resigns as head coach, six weeks before training camp, and not through an official team statement, rather putting out a pr statement of his own, citing lack of “say in decisions that impact the team’s performance.” roy not only leaves, but he takes every coaching staff and support staff member loyal to him as he returns to the remparts, preferring to be king of a castle he can control. roy guts the avalanche logistically and in morale, and his leaving is a key part of how the following 16-17 season would become the worst in franchise history. 

okay buckle up because this story is arrested development bonkers.

when tyson was growing up, len barrie ii was a perennial fourth liner bouncing from nhl to ahl to the german del to the now defunct ihl and finishing his career with the panthers. (notably, he was not in the 1995 jean claude van damme hockey based vehicle “sudden death,” despite several of his teammates at the time being there.) like all barries, len was irreverently charming and had a habit of cultivating friendships across the league, a talent that he would later learn to use for evil. 

the story of len barrie is the story of bear mountain, a golf resort in their hometown victoria. to begin this story, we have to go back to april of 1999, when len barrie cut down some trees overhanging his backyard fence. those trees belonged to the neighboring country club, the royal colwood. the colwood banned len and tyson (at this time 9 years old) from the club for life, len sued and settled for $14k, and decided to use that as money to build his own, better golf club. len leveraged his nhl connections and friendships to get millions in investments from his former nhl friends, and got to work. 

the building of bear mountain, to put it lightly, was a disaster. development stalled over years, as len blustered his way past zoning laws, ecological concerns, and calls from the local indigenous people, the salish, that he was destroying sacred heritage sites. 

and then, len decided this was the perfect time to buy the tampa bay lightning in co-ownership with oren koules. len proved to be as good an owner as he was a hockey player and land developer, constantly clashing with koules over team decisions to the point where bettman had to step in and mediate. this was before, of course, the league found out that len didn’t actually have the money to own a hockey team. 

as it turns out, all of his money was tied up in assets, particularly one very expensive asset: the half-developed bear mountain. so when the bear mountain holding company filed for bankruptcy, and more than a dozen nhlers lost a collective $13 million, his capability to support owning the lightning collapsed, and he was bought out of the team. tyson was drafted a few months before this, and begged his dad not to draft him, already branded by being the rich boy son of a guy half the league hated. mired in lawsuits and reviled by most of the league, len retreated home to bear mountain, until he was forced out and evicted there too.

oh i've only been into hockey for three years and most of my knowledge of avs history past that is fuzzy and based off hearsay and google. for all of those three years, joe sakic has always been kind of a mystery to me.

sakic has been gm of the avs for seven years now, and captain of the nordiques and avs through relocation for another sixteen. he's a 1600 point hall of famer, two time stanley cup winner, and by pretty much every metric the defining player of the franchise. but when you think of the avs brand today, under gabe landeskog, it doesn't quite vibe at first. sakic is quiet and calculating, avoiding a lot of media except for a few witty quotes every once in a while.

but he's also the guy who broke three fingers using a snow blower while already out with a herniated disc. he's the guy whose most memorable moments of being a gm were the public and messy feud between him and a power hungry patrick roy that lead to his head coach and basically the entire coaching staff leaving weeks before training camp and setting up the worst season in franchise history before rebuilding them into one of the best teams in the nhl, and a dramatic threeway trade that sent his publicly dissatisfied top line center packing in the middle of a game.

he's careful with his players, and knows when to assuage their fears--this year alone he brought tyson jost and martin kaut into his office to assure them they weren't going to be traded--and has seemed to find a talent for finding and nurturing hidden talent. his decisions as a gm never seem thoughtless, and i have to respect that.

he's also a lying little weasel man who joked about trading tyson barrie at the draft to lull me into a false sense of security and then pulled the rug out from under me so, mixed bag