Eurolanche

Hockey notebooks

As I’ve already mentioned, I’ve been writing notebooks about the Colorado Avalanche since 2000 until 2008. I’ve lost the first one and the one from the locked-out 2004-05 obviously never came to be. We’ve already talked about the oldest preserved one. Let’s take a look at the other ones, five in total, thanks to which I could record the history of the Colorado Avalanche.

As if Galaxie Sport coming to my living room during the 2002-03 started the evolution of my notebooks as well. What was initially a little season notebook became a big book with cut-out photos and articles about Avs players from ProHockey. It also included more innovations. Each page now fitted four, sometimes five games. Additionally, I wrote down notes vertically along each page. The notes were basically phrases like “Colorado, what are you doing?”, “Only one point for an overtime loss?”, transactions news, Bob Hartley being replaced by Tony Granato (whom I wrote down as „some Todd Granato“) and injury reports. During the playoffs, I couldn’t leave out writing down “Detroit lost in the first round with Anaheim!!! Great! And they were the reigning champions. Serves them right! For winning with the Avs last year”. Obviously, I didn’t shy away from showing my emotions back than and those of you, who have read some of my most-recent articles, will certainly agree that I still don’t. Colorado also lost in the first round, a shameful loss to Minnesota. My last line in the notebook saying “Next season will be better” never came true. Only the end of the 2002-03 regular season could satisfy me. Only a single game was still to be played. Colorado needed a miracle to win the former Northwest Division and Peter Forsberg needed one to win the league‘s scoring title. Colorado had 103 points, Vancouver had 104. Paradoxically, Forsberg had 103 points, Markus Naslund had 104. Vancouver hosted the Los Angeles Kings who were out of the playoff picture by then. Colorado hosted St. Louis. In my mind, I told myself a sentence I’d rather forget. It was something along the way of Colorado doesn’t need to win the Stanley Cup if they win tonight. And what happened? The Avs won, Vancouver shockingly lost 0-2 and Forsberg scored a goal and added two assists. No team has broken Colorado’s division title record since then. A triumphant victory! But no Stanley Cup...

I tried to include new features in each notebook that followed. With the time, the notebooks included drawn logos of the NHL and the Avs,the line-up for the first game,basic information about the team, pre-season games results, detailed regular season stats, monthly stats and my rating of each month on a scale from 1 to 10, similar ratings of each player, scheduled games on each TV station available in Slovakia, team salary, names of players who assisted on goals (which was included in the last notebook for the 2007-08 season!) and a single-word summary of each game. The notebook from the 2003-04 season will always stand out, because each page contained the color red, with which I highlighted Slovak Avs players, either if they played (Budaj), or if they recorded any points (Svatos). And both did, a lot in fact, namely Marek had a great season and it’s very nostalgic looking at it after all these years.

I’ll be brief describing the second notebook category, the so-called side notebooks. These were mostly additional notebooks, there wasn’t much of an emotional connection in them, unlike in the season notebooks. For example, two side notebooks were full of season stats of Avalanche players, updated from 2002 until 2008. I also have to mention my attempt at writing a historical book about the NHL, which ended after a couple of pages with me writing out all Stanley Cup champions and leaving space for new ones up until 2100. I finally updated the period after 2011 until today while writing this book. Another part of the side notebooks were printed materials. Nowadays, it seems almost absurd to print out older articles, for example a number of articles about the first lockout, Avalanche team and individual records, the club’s address, a list of drafted players and other material. Today, all this can be found on the internet. Back then, when I had no internet connection, the most valuable source of information was paper with little black letters. If all went well, the pictures were even in color.

In case you’re interested in the unabridged, colored PDF version of the book, contact us at eurolanche@eurolanche.com. The physical copies are all sold out.

 

There was a special little notebook, which I always took to the TV at any time at night, when the Avalanche played and where I wrote down the events of the game in the style of today’s live trackers. I don’t know why I did it, because I didn’t have much use for it.

While browsing the hundreds, maybe even thousands of pages from my notebooks, I stumbled upon what’s most likely my first article about the Colorado Avalanche from 2001, not long before the start of the Stanley Cup Finals. In 15 lines, containing big factual errors, I briefly summed up how the team came into existence and its performance in the playoffs. Who would’ve said that after 16 years, I would’ve written more than a thousand articles about that one team.

The last subcategory of the side notebooks is a collection of cut out articles from Czechoslovak magazines and newspapers not only about the Avs, but about important NHL events in general, for example the then-ongoing lockout. The majority of the articles are about Marek Svatos, one of the league’s rising stars.