Colorado Avalanche: 3

Edmonton Oilers: 0

I have a confession to make: I apparently don’t know how to run my PVR. For a variety of reasons I ended up catching only the first period and relying on my recorder for the rest, and somehow I ended up not recording the hockey game. By the sounds of it, the central themes of the first period (brilliance from Jeff Deslauriers and the goalposts, total domination by the Avalanche) continued unabated throughout the game.

It almost makes me wonder if the PVR was trying to save me – because that first period was the worst hockey I’ve seen in at least the last five games. The power play was brutal – not only did the Avalanche manage to outplay the Oilers on it, but Penner and Gagner were on different pages ,Gilbert and Chorney seemed lackadaisical, and Lubomir Visnovsky was uncharacteristically sloppy. The period got worse from there.

In fact, I’m fairly sure the post-period smack talk went something like this:

Statistical anomaly of the night: Ethan Moreau led the Oilers with five shots, and his line was the only Oilers’ line that out-shot the Avalanche (although tossing in blocked shots and missed shots it seems clear they weren’t dominant territorially).