At the end of last season head coach Patrick Roy showed up to a press conference with a paper listing the Colorado Avalanche injury list. The implications were clear — the list was so long, he couldn’t be expected to remember it. Frankly, he seemed to be doing it for effect.
Indeed, coach Roy has not made a show of referring to his injured reserve list this year. There’s no show — the Colorado Avalanche are the walking wounded.
The Avalanche Twitter account pointed out a franchise record no one wanted to see broken:
The #Avs tonight will break the franchise record for the most man-games lost due to injury in a season at 478 (previous: 474 in 2010-11).
— Colorado Avalanche (@Avalanche) April 7, 2015
That’s just nauseating — 478 man games lost. And they’ll lose a few more with the remaining two games.
I don’t even have a list, so I know I won’t be able to list every player and his number of games lost. However, starting with the beginning of the season, I can talk a little bit about what the Avalanche missed when they lost all those man games.