Colorado Avalanche: Bad Team Survival Guide

A quick survival guide to dealing with the painfulness of watching a Colorado Avalanche hockey game.

The Colorado Avalanche are a bad hockey team. They’ve been a bad hockey team for a few years now, but it really feels worse this year. Aside from the flashes of brilliance by Matt Duchene and Nathan MacKinnon, I can’t tell you a single good thing that stands out about this team. Semyon Varlamov is inconsistent, the defense is bad (especially without Erik Johnson), and the offense barely exists.

The Avs are a team filled with young players who may never live up to their potential and old players who might be holding those young players back from living up to that potential.

When you’re a fan of a bad sports team, life is tough. On one hand, you want to be supportive and stick with them through the tough times. You want to keep watching every game so you can properly assess the problems and try to come up with a solution, even if you’re the only one listening to that solution.

On the other hand, you don’t want to waste three hours of your night watching a poor hockey team. There are so many better things you can be doing than watching a Colorado Avalanche game for three hours. There’s like a million three hour tasks you can do. There’s also like five million one hour tasks that you can do three times. Or you can do…well, you see where I’m going.

So how do you cope with a bad hockey team? Here’s my survival guide.

More from Mile High Sticking

*Watch Other Hockey: You want to watch hockey. You love watching hockey. But you don’t want to watch the Avs because you’re not quite sure that the Avs are playing hockey. I know everyone says they are playing hockey, but you’re still not 100% convinced.

So, watch other hockey. There are 29 other teams in the league. All of them are better than the Avs. A lot of them are really good. And even the bad teams are at least fun. Watch them. Fall in love with hockey all over again. Remind yourself that hockey can be a beautiful sport with beautiful players.

And then flip back to the Avs and hate yourself some more.

*Drink. A lot: This is a Nadia special (sorry, Nadia). But quite honestly, it should be an Avalanche special at this point. If you’re not drinking during an Avs game, how are you making it through?

You can even come up with a fun drinking game. Take a shot every time the Avs get a shot on goal. No, don’t do that. You’ll barely drink. Take a shot every the time other team gets a shot on goal. Wait, don’t do that either. You’ll be dead by the end of the second period.

Take a shot every time Nikita Zadorov takes a penalty. Or every time Jarome Iginla loses a battle in the corner. Come to think of it, it’s really tough to play a drinking game while watching the Avs. If you take a shot every time they do something good, you’ll never drink. And if you take a shot every time they do something bad, you’ll quickly run out of alcohol. Just drink responsibly.

*Play NHL 17: I don’t think NHL 17 is a great game by any means. It’s been the same game for the past five years. But it’s the only hockey game on the market and it’s still fun.

Fire that baby up, start a GM mode with the Avs, and play the games yourself. You can trade all the players you dislike or you can play every game and win the majority of them. Unless you’re not very good. And if that’s the case, just lower the difficulty level. Wouldn’t it be awesome if the Avs could lower the difficulty level?

*Don’t Be Too Hard On Yourself: Miss a weeks worth of games? Don’t worry about it. You just missed the Avs scoring five goals in three games and getting shutout at least once.

It’s ok to skip games and not feel bad about skipping games. It doesn’t make you any less of a fan. You’re a fan of McDonald’s, right? But if you go a week without McDonald’s, it’s not the end of the world.

You think Jennifer Lawrence is good looking and a good actress, right? But if you wait for Passengers to come out on DVD instead of spending $15 on a movie ticket, it’s ok. In fact, this leads me to my next tip.

*Moderate Yourself: It’s unhealthy to watch every Avs game. Just like it’s unhealthy to eat McDonald’s every week and pay $15 for bad movies.

Watching every single Avs game doesn’t do you any good. You waste three hours of your time and get no satisfaction from it because chances are they won’t even score a goal so you can celebrate and give yourself hope.

It’s like if you take a date to see a Lord of the Rings movie. You pay for both tickets, you watch the entire movie, and then she doesn’t even give you a kiss on the cheek or call you the next day. You just wasted your money to watch guys walk up a mountain for three hours. Which, is pretty much like watching the Avs right now.

Watch one Avs game a week. And make sure it’s against a good team. That way you can see good players and not feel quite as bad when they lose.

*Rewatch Old Games/Highlights: The Avs were a good team at one point. It was 15 years ago, but they were good. They had the best goalie of all-time. They had a stacked defense. They had a dynamite offense. They were really good. Go watch that team.

And feel fortunate that you’re able to watch old footage of a really good hockey team. Think about Coyotes fans. Their team isn’t very good and they’ve only won two playoff series in their existence. That must suck. Be grateful that you have good memories to watch. And then go back to hating the present.

Next: Is Iginla Pulling His Weight?

*Tweet: For the most part, Avs fans know that this team sucks. There’s no delusion. Sure, some fans may think that certain guys need a little more time or that some guys are better than they are playing. But generally, every Avs fan hates every player on the team and feels they are hopeless.

(Editor’s note: You know that’s not my assessment of Erik Johnson, but Jeremy has a point.)

Talk with these people. They are all good people who are going through the same thing you’re going through.

Remember: When you’re a Colorado Avalanche fan, you’re not alone in your misery.