Wednesday, December 06, 2006

WORST JERSEY RETIREMENT EVER?



Colorado Avalanche Retire Ray Bourque's #77.

I couldn't believe it when I saw the Avs chose to hold a jersey retirement ceremony for end-of-career rental Ray Bourque, who helped the team win the Stanley Cup in 2000-2001.
I've always liked Ray Bourque's mixture of reliable defence, scoring contribution and leadership. Colorado were one of those pre-new-CBA teams that would always scoop up high-priced free agents (Bourque, Selanne, Kariya) when they needed them - because they could.

All this talk of retiring players and jersey ceremonies reminded me of that sham of a farce of a travesty of a snow job when they did a good thing for a great player that they really had no right to do.
They were doing nothing more than hanging off the coattails of a great and well-loved player.
The guy did play 94 regular season games (out of 1612 career NHL games - 5.8%) and 34 playoff games (out of 214 - 15.8%) with Colorado. Why not?
Hey, Avs. Guy Lafleur played 98 games with the Nords at the end of his career. He was pretty good too. Retire his number too.

1 comment:

Doogie2K said...

Hell, I'd settle for them re-retiring their old Nords jerseys: Goulet, P. Stastny, Tardif, and I think Cloutier.