Colorado Avalanche: Ranking the Best Goalie Masks in Avalanche History

The Colorado Avalanche have had quite a few goaltenders during their relatively short NHL career as a team. Time to go back and rank the best goalie masks during that tenure.

The Colorado Avalanche have had way too many goalies for me to rank ALL the goalie masks, but I can at least go through the notables.

However, what does the term “notable” entail? It’s such an ambiguous term.

Luckily, I have established some criteria noteworthy enough to help give the term “notable” some boundaries.

Once again, this is biased, but I think most people will agree with the inclusions on this list, and why they were included.

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So, first the criteria for notability:

• Each goalie on the list has to have played at least 65 games in an Avalanche uniform.
• I am not dealing with the goalies who played for the Quebec Nordiques, so this list begins in 1996.
• All the goalies on the list played at least two years with the Colorado Avalanche.
• Each goalie on the list played in at least 20 games — barring injury during a year, the year they were traded, or the year they were called up from the AHL — in each of the seasons they were with the Avalanche.
• The goalies masks featured are the ones that these goalies were best known for.

Pretty easy criteria eh? Said criteria for notability leaves me with a list of nine goalies:

• Patrick Roy
• Craig Billington
• David Aebischer
• Peter Budaj
• Jose Theodore
• Craig Anderson
• Semyon Varlamov
• Jean-Sebastien Giguere
• Calvin Pickard

I’ll be doing this in slide show format, and the ranking goes from worst to best (by player, not by mask). With that being said, the last slide will detail the top three masks total from the nine players listed above.

So, without further adieu, meet the first goalie on this list.