Thursday, 9:00 p.m. at Pepsi Center
While most everyone around the NHL expected the Colorado Avalanche to be a bottom-feeding team, following one of the worst non-expansion seasons in recent NHL history last season (22-56-4, 48 points), the Avalanche have come out of the starting blocks in 2017-18 with a solid 6-5-0 start, good for 3rd place in the Central Division in the early going. While you cannot draw too many conclusions from just 11 games, it is no doubt a breath of fresh Rocky Mountain air for fans in Denver, who spent all offseason awaiting the seemingly inevitable Matt Duchene trade which never came, all the while dreading what could, on paper, be a worst team than last season’s dumpster fire with Duchene gone.