Colorado Avalanche: Early Season Evaluation and Pressure for Tyson Jost

Twitter Roundtable on Tyson Jost

This roundtable is a little harder to manage because, by the very nature of Twitter, the conversations are all over the place. Twitter is literally one big tangential conversation.

However, Avs fans came up with some really good — and some really annoying — opinions about Tyson Jost. Indeed, I’d go so far as to call him a hot topic right now.

Here’s one of the tweets that started the Twitter firestorm:

I especially liked J.D. Killian’s response — she writes for the Hockey Writers:

Dario, who usually has pretty good hockey opinions, came up with this doozy:

“His skating stinks” is just brutal and wrong. I’ll go into Jost’s skating specifically, but just mark my response here as “Nope.”

I did ask for some clarification. While Dario himself didn’t answer, I got two responses from Pelley:

I had had that exact thought — the Colorado Avalanche are a team that have spent at least the last three years building their style around skating. A, no bad skater is going to make the roster. B, great skaters are going to look pedestrian next to elite skaters. Put a great skater like Jost on a team that less emphasizes skating, and you have one of their best skaters.

Going back to J.D.’s tweet, Dario gave a couple more… reasoned responses:

I also liked J.D.’s reply:

Avalanche Germany, who started one of the tweet storms, responded with, “I may be in the minority, but I like his defensive game a lot this year.”

I have to agree. After this little Twitter exchange with the captain:

I decided to watch Jost’s defense in particular. He’s not going to be a Selke Trophy finalist any time soon, but I’ve seen a definite improvement in his backchecking.

An earlier tweet by Mile High Sports writer Evan Rawal tried to get the masses rumbling:

Evan elicited one ice-cold take:

In that thread, tweeter Mike Olson opined that “Kerfoot and Wilson have both looked good. Jost has struggled to find space.” Fans also questioned whether Jost was a valid second-line center or even a center at all.

I’ll explore that a little later.

Anthrax Jones is not known for his reasoning. However, he does know his hockey, and he’s a popular fixture in Avs Nation. He got a pretty good dialogue going with this tweet:

Because of Anthrax’s popularity, this tweetstorm is the epitome of tangential. However, some of the highlights include discussing whether Jost has “too much in the toolbox not to break out” (Anthrax) and labeling Jost as a Swiss army knife (also Anthrax — he really is clever.)

This particular response seems to encapsulate Avalanche fan’s anxiety:

So much of the discussion has to do with Jost’s abilities and ceiling. So let’s look into that in more depth.