Avs “Double Tap” ‘Canes

I’m not going to write a full report tonight, just a couple of notes on the game.

It’s obvious Joe Sacco took his Avs players to the theater as a reward for their impressive road trip. The movie? Zombieland. What’s more, they brought some the the lessons in Zombieland onto the ice tonight. Namely, Rule #2, The Double Tap. In the movie, to ensure that you’ve sufficiently killed a zombie, you “double tap” them, or, shoot them twice. In the first two periods of Friday night’s game against Carolina, the Avs “double tapped” every time the Hurricanes seemed to be developing some momentum. Ryan O’Reilly and Paul Stastny scored 31 seconds apart in the 1st period to tie the game 2-2. Halfway through the 2nd period, the Avs struck again, this time Milan Hejduk scored the first and leading scorer Wojtek Wolski provided the “double tap” 40 seconds later.

Several Avalanche players played excellent tonight and were rewarded with multipoint games. Here’s the list:

Paul Stastny: 2G-1A…3 points

Wojtek Wolski: 1G-1A…2 points

Ryan O’Reilly: 1G-1A…2 points

Milan Hejduk: 1G-1A…2 points

Matt Duchene: 2A…2 points

Chris Stewart: 2A…2 points

Every point earned by the Avs tonight were to one of these guys except one: Ryan Wilson scored his 1st NHL point when he added the helper to Stastny’s first goal of the night.

Craig Anderson stopped his first penalty shot of the season in the 3rd period.

Darcy Tucker was checked into the boards from behind by Tuomo Ruutu five minutes into the 2nd period and had to be taken off the ice in a stretcher. Sacco revealed in his postgame interview that Tucker suffered a concussion, but no other information is available at this point. Although the Ottawa Senator’s Jarkko Ruutu is the “dirty” Ruutu in the NHL, I fully expect a suspension to be announced for Tuomo in the next few games.

Colorado is now 3-0 at home this season. They play Detroit tomorrow night, which is why Anderson was supposed to get the night off. As long as Anderson continues to play the way he has in the first 10 games of the season, there shouldn’t be a problem in that department.