Avs Lines

With the Avs trading, drafting, releasing, and signing players, I wanted to keep track. Partly just to understand, partly so I can update my NHL 11 rosters and play with next year's team.

Before I look at next year, I wanted to recap as best I could where we were last year:

Forwards

Here are the 15 forwards that made up the Avs rosters, arranged in lines, roughly in order.

McGinn - Duchene - Parenteau
Landeskog - O`Reilly - Hejduk
Downie - Stastny - Jones
McLeod - Mitchell - Kobasew
Bordeleau - Olver - Palushaj

Downie was injured all season, but am including him as on the roster. Jones was traded away. Hejduk is expected to retire.

Immediately after the draft, Roy announced his top 3 lines of forwards:

Ryan O’Reilly — Matt Duchene — P.A. Parenteau
Gabe Landeskog — Paul Stastny — Alex Tanguay
Jamie McGinn — Nathan MacKinnon — Steve Downie

I thought this was super strange to announce before any practices. And who's on the fourth line? Some combination of McLeod - Mitchell - Kobasew - Bordeleau - Olver - Palushaj. Here's who I would pick and how I would arrange the top 9, so that the veteran Tanguay could be placed with the rookie draft pick and I'd rather have O'Reilly help Stastny than Duchene.

2013 Forwards

Jamie McGinn— Matt Duchene — P.A. Parenteau
Gabe Landeskog — Paul Stastny — Ryan O’Reilly
Alex Tanguay — Nathan MacKinnon — Steve Downie
Patrick Bordeleau — John Mitchell —Mark Olver


Defense

Our defense sucks. Here's who the Avs trotted out last year.

Johnson - Hunwick
Hejda - O'Brien
Wilson - Barrie
Elliott - Zanon

O'Brien was traded. Zanon was bought out. Hunwick was waived but no one picked him up, so the Avs still own him.

The Avs acquired Cory Sarich from Calgary. And just signed Andre Benoit from Ottawa. No clue if these are actually upgrades.

At this moment it seems like these are the Avs' top 8 defensemen, which is sad.

Johnson - Wilson
Hejda - Barrie
Sarich - Elliott
Benoit - Hunwick