Colorado Avalanche

Cellar dwellers just a season ago, the Colorado Avalanche have experienced a drastic turnaround and The Denver Post's Benjamin Hochman reports that they are now on track for the NHL's fifth-best season-to-season improvement in points percentage since 1967-68.

Colorado undertook a rebuilding project after the 2009-10 season, and the first two years went about how you'd expect.

The 2010-11 Avalanche finished 30-44-8, before improving to 41-35-6 in 2011-12. With a slew of talented young forwards in the organization, it was reasonable to expect the team to take another step forward in 2012-13.

Instead, the Avs struggled to a 16-25-7 record during a lockout-shortened season, with the team's .406 points percentage marking a low point since the franchise relocated from Quebec to Colorado in 1995. The miserable 2012-13 Avs finished last in the Northwest Division and had a minus-36 goal differential in just 48 games.

With all the young talent still in place, Colorado figured to be among the NHL's most improved teams this season.

Still, nobody expected the turnaround to be this drastic, as the Avalanche have an excellent 46-21-6 record following Thursday's 3-2 shootout win over the Vancouver Canucks.

On track for the Western Conference's No. 5 seed, Colorado has a .671 points percentage, far ahead of anything the team has done in recent years. Unless they somehow fall below .640 before the end of the season, this year's Avs will have the franchise's best points percentage since the 2000-01 team posted a .720 mark on its way to a Stanley Cup.

The improvement from .406 to .671 (plus-.265) would be the fifth-biggest in the NHL since '67-'68, but the Avs still have an outside chance to climb even higher. The fourth-most improved team since '67-'68, the 2006-07 Penguins, noticed a .286 jump in points percentage from the previous season.

To surpass those Penguins, the Avs need 16 points from their final nine games, which may be asking just a bit too much.

The team is certainly capable of such a run, but its remaining slate includes two games against the San Jose Sharks and one game apiece against the Anaheim Ducks, Pittsburgh Penguins, St. Louis Blues and New York Rangers.

Call it a hunch, but Matt Duchene and Co. would probably settle for the fifth-biggest improvement and home-ice advantage in the first round of the playoffs.

MONTREAL - It was right around “the rocket’s red glare” when one of the loudest ovations of the night reverberated through the Bell Centre, when the former Montreal Canadien's face appeared on the JumboTron during the American national anthem.

The Rocket’s red glare will most famously always belong to Maurice Richard, no player more beloved in the rich history of the Montreal Canadiens. That Patrick Roy received such a loud and proud reception from Habs fans Tuesday night when his face flashed on the screen was final proof all has been forgiven between him and the fans who once mocked each other right before exiting the final game he ever played for the Canadiens, Dec. 2, 1995.

He allowed nine goals to the Detroit Red Wings that final game, humiliated by his former coach, Mario Tremblay, for keeping him in well beyond the usual mercy rule of five or six goals. He vowed never to play for the Canadiens again, and he didn’t. He went on to Denver and won two Stanley Cups instead. Humiliation, right back at you Montreal.

Eventually, however, time softened those bad, old feelings. Finally, in 2008, the Canadiens honored Roy by retiring his number 33, and Roy in turn apologized for the tempestuous behavior that helped cause his exit.

Tuesday night, though, Roy was back in Montreal and looking for victory once again on behalf of the Colorado Avalanche. It didn’t happen. Roy got the loudest cheer before the game, but Thomas Vanek surpassed those with a hat-trick performance in Montreal’s 6-3 victory.

“I wish he could have waited one more game to get his first goals for Montreal,” Roy said afterward, surrounded by a large group of reporters.

The 48-year-old Avs coach didn’t like what he saw on the scoreboard above the ice at the end but called it a “classy” gesture by Habs management on it before the game.

Roy could have been seen a lot more around the Bell Centre the last couple of years, it turns out. Roy, the only player in NHL history to win three Conn Smythe Trophies in three different decades (1986, 1993 and 2001), revealed on Monday that he wanted the Canadiens' coaching job when it opened up in 2012. He said he interviewed with general manager Marc Bergevin, who chose Michel Therrien instead.

Whether the Canadiens made another giant mistake in letting Roy slip away to Denver can’t fully be judged yet. Montreal has been a playoff team under Therrien and looks to be on its way again this spring. The win over Roy’s Avalanche certainly helped.

Yet, Roy looks like a shoo-in for the Jack Adams Award as NHL coach of the year. Despite a very young team and a defense constructed largely from discarded scrap parts from other teams, the Avs entered Wednesday one point ahead of Chicago for second place in the Central Division. A first-round matchup with the Blackhawks looks highly probable, and Colorado won four of five regular-season meetings, with goalie Semyon Varlamov going 4-0 with a .960 saves percentage.

Roy said he has used three different seasons for inspiration to get his Avs to believe in themselves, two that were very positive for him and one not so much. The two positives were the Stanley Cups he won with Montreal in 1986 and 1993, on teams that were picked by few, if any, to win it all. Then there was the 2003 playoff series Roy and the Avalanche had against the Minnesota Wild, when the Avs blew a 3-1 lead and lost in seven. It would be Roy’s final games in the NHL.

“We probably aren’t the best team in the league on paper. But one thing we are allowed to do is play hard, and I’m using that last year of my career against Minnesota,” Roy said. “Jacques Lemaire was the coach on the other side, and they had a lot less payroll than ours. But they kept going at us, even down 3-1. In ’86 and ’93, we weren’t the best teams on paper either, but we believed in ourselves. The approach we had those years, I’m showing them a lot to our players now. If we keep it positive, keep working hard, we can accomplish a lot.”

The looks on the faces of many of Roy’s players after the loss to the Canadiens resembled those of the child letting down the parent. The bond between Roy and his players is very strong, and they badly wanted to win one for their “partner”, as Roy likes to call his relationship with the players. But goalie Jean-Sebastien Giguere, whose likely retirement after this season prompted Roy to give him the start in his hometown, could not get it done, allowing five goals, including a couple of softies.

“I didn’t play too well. It’s disappointing,” Giguere said quietly. “We wanted to win for him.”

Not a problem, Roy said.

“I appreciate what these guys have done,” he said. “I didn’t want them to feel pressure to win a hockey game for their coach. I wanted them to go out and win one for the hockey team. It’s all about team here. I certainly don’t want to put myself ahead of the team.”

For one night anyway, that was unavoidable. 

Adrian Dater has covered the NHL since 1995 for The Denver Post. Follow him on Twitter @Adater  

DENVER — Go to any Colorado Avalanche practice and you’ll quickly be struck by two things, both related to Patrick Roy: one, that there’s no need for a whistle around his neck. The whistle Roy can produce with his lips is an omnipresence of high pitch, and his players so used to it that their ears practically dart upward like those of dogs to their master.

The other is his hands-on approach to running drills. This is not some coach standing off to the sideboards checking his watch and having his assistants fish pucks out of the corner. When the Avs are practicing a play, Roy is often right there in the middle of it, skating right along with the puck and barking out instructions as he goes.

When Roy proclaimed to his new team, on the first day of training camp, that he wanted to be their “partner,” he seemed to take things to a new level in that regard as a coach. And how has that approach worked out so far?

They might as well just give him the Jack Adams Award now. With 69 points entering Saturday’s game at Tampa Bay, Colorado is looking like a great bet to make the playoffs in the brutal Western Conference. A team that finished 29th overall last season, the Avs under Roy have been fast, fun to watch and play with the same spunky attitude that characterized him as a player.

His team isn’t where it wants to be just yet—the defense remains iffy, and some of Colorado’s young players have yet to prove themselves in the pressure of a playoff race—but it’s a lot further along to this point than anyone thought possible.

When the Avs adopted a “Why Not Us?” motto suggested by former defenseman Ray Bourque at a team dinner at his Boston North End restaurant early in the season, most pundits went “how cute.”

“We wanted to shock the hockey world,” Roy said.

They have. But can the Avs really close the deal and make the playoffs? Some still question whether they might not still be a little too green—Roy included—to withstand what figures to be a fiercely contested final third of the season in the West.

“It’s important for us to just focus on ourselves, to try and improve every day and work hard,” Roy said. “We don’t want to look too far ahead. It’s one game at a time for us.”

What has made Roy such a good coach so fast? While he has the high standards of any coach, players say he is a teacher, not just a sloganeer.

“He explains things to you, how to make things he wants done actually work,” veteran defenseman Jan Hejda said. “And if you want to ask a question or even suggest something, he listens.”

Watch Roy on the bench during a game. Watch how vocal and involved he is with every inch traveled by the puck. Many NHL coaches are curious in their stoicism on the bench, but not Roy. By game’s end, his tie is loosened, his shirt less tucked in and his vocal chords quite a bit more hoarse.

Roy’s famous temper was on national display on opening night, when he blew up at Anaheim coach Bruce Boudreau and nearly pushed the glass partition separating the benches down on his head. But he’s been a model citizen since, rarely getting into it with referees or the opposition.

That opening-night shove, though? It had a great effect on the locker room. Here was a coach ready to literally fight for them after four years of Joe Sacco, whose hands-in-pockets, passive-aggressive demeanor wore as thin as shaved ice with players by the end.

It hasn’t been just a change in culture that has helped the Avs. Roy has real ideas about the game, and he quickly implemented a new system for the team. Defensively, he uses more of a triangle forechecking scheme in the neutral and opposing end zones. In his own end, Roy favors a cyclone-style system where defensemen funnel the puck up the middle to a forward with speed. While those are hardly original ideas, to a chip-and-chase team like the Avs of the previous four years, they were.

Early in the season, Avs center and Canadian Olympian Matt Duchene flat out said players had no confidence in Sacco’s system. “We knew it would fail,” Duchene told The Denver Post.

Now, there is nothing but dressing room confidence in management’s leadership and direction.

"We were losing all the time. Things weren't changing much. It was just bad in here. When you came to the rink, it was always just 'Groundhog Day' here. People were scared, people were stepping on eggshells," center and U.S. Olympian Paul Stastny told The Denver Post. "But now, on the rink and off, we're finally having some fun again. In the past, if you wanted something to change, you'd be told, 'Look in the mirror first, you gotta play better.' Well, yeah, I understand that, but in the past it was players on one side and management on the other side and there wasn't much communication. We have more of a two-way street now."

Under Roy, the Avs have a shot at posting one of the biggest one-year turnarounds in NHL history. Now that would be something to whistle at.

Adrian Dater has covered the NHL since 1995 for The Denver Post. Follow him on Twitter @Adater.