FanHouse Denver

I very much enjoy Adrian Dater's All Things Avs blog for the Denver Post because he writes about what the fans care about and, frequently, channels their emotions -- see his post about whether it would be better for the Avalanche to miss the postseason entirely rather than suffer a pummeling at the hands of Detroit. But the real reason to keep an eye on Dater's blog is for those occasions when he goes completely off the deep end with a rage-fueled, unfiltered rant. The best example of this was his epic take on an ESPN "stooge" that "might make more money than me, but spends his/her entire day preening around the athletic arena, microphone in hand, makeup case in hand, hair spray in hand, ready to ask an inane, suckup, kiss-butt question to a player..."

Last night, as Calgary defenseman Dion Phaneuf played a brutally physical game against Peter Forsberg in the Avs' 2-0 win over the Flames, Dater's emotions got the best of him again:

Phaneuf is a punk, by the way. And some day he's going to get his, and it's not going to be pretty for him. He's going to hit one backside of a player too many, and somebody is going to rip that shield off his face and hand him his teeth. (And yes, he's an effective player, though, because he DOES get people off their games mentally. But a punk is a punk is a punk). We'll see if the Avs have any hair on their chests the rest of the night or not. I said it once and I'll say it again - you gotta smack the bully in the mouth.

Yowzer. Dater added two amendments to that post during the evening: Fine-tuning his critique by saying that Phaneuf "doesn't play an honorable game" and that he's "got a lot of Bill Laimbeer in him"; and later explaining to his detractors that he is not, as they claim, "a Claude Lemieux defender or apologist." Rage on, Dater...

Every day from Monday to Saturday, The Ice Sheet will take a look at the biggest stories in the league that happened on the ice and elsewhere the night before.

Wait, Jose Theodore Did What?
The incredible decline of Colorado Avalanche goalie Jose Theodore's reputation has been well-documented. Winning the Hart and Vezina trophies, and then ending up as a $6 million bench-warmer, with the stats to match. Propecia-gate before the Olympics. His public tryst with noted scholar Paris Hilton.

Last night, all of that was back-burnered, if at least for a game. After the Calgary Flames chased Avs starter Peter Budaj with four goals, Theodore came off the pine and stopped 17 shots, winning the game in a glorified skills competition the shootout, 5-4. "I was trying to keep it simple, give my team a chance to win, and they showed a lot of character coming back," he said after the game. Don't you love it when the male models play humble?

I found it interesting that the Associated Press led with Theodore's unexpected performance, but that Adrian Dater of the Denver Post didn't drop his name until the eighth paragraph and downplayed his efforts while lauding those of the team in front of him. Perhaps he knew other publications would be playing the Theodore angle. Perhaps Dater, and Avs fans, have been conditioned in the post-Roy years to expect a goalie to lose a game and a team to win one. Or perhaps even on a redemptive night, Jose Theodore will always be seen as a cap-killing financial albatross and an unqualified bust between the pipes in Denver.

(Coming up next: The Hartley/Waddell Death Watch continues, Marty Brodeur's afraid of his own stats, Most Embarrassing Stat Line of Last Night, this week's "Aitch Effy," and Tonight's Games You Should Be Watching.)

Yes, it's that time of year - time for snow, time for the holidays, time for family, and most importantly, time to discuss Broncos playoff implications. Well, that and Jay Cutler's performance against Arizona is the subject of the latest Broncos AOL FanHouse podcast.

Listen to the Broncos AOL FanHouse Podcast.

But the real news around Denver is SNOW, and lots of it (according to Sam's calculations, about a billion inches). Yes, that picture you see above is of my porch, ...or at least, of the mounds of snow covering my porch. Note that the snow inside the porch is almost up over the porch wall, which is in turn covered by a plainly visible, two-foot or so wall of snow. Also take a look at the roof, which has its own massive drift of snow - oh, and to top all of this off, it's still coming down!

But anyhow, thanks to the wonderful technological achievement that is the internet, we've been able to bring you this podcast without roughing the elements. So enjoy, and if you're in Denver tonight, stay inside and stay warm.

Thanks to the magic of flexible scheduling, we get to wait until this evening to renew our rivalry with one of our most hated old AFC West compatriots, the Denver Broncos. And when any Seahawk fan thinks of a match-up against the Broncos, they still break out in a cold sweat wondering if old #7 is lining up under center, which is why I went 'old school' with the accompanying graphic.

This week's enemy blogger is Gabe Stein from the Broncos FanHouse. Special appreciation to Alan from the 12 Seahawks Street blog, without whom there wouldn't be a Five Questions post this week, and to Gabe, who turned around his responses to these questions in less than 24 hours. That's why there's no reciprocal post this week.

Now, onto the Five Questions:

1. You do realize that your franchise savior, Jay Cutler, is from Vanderbilt, right? Vanderbilt. The biggest game this guy won was beating Middle Tennessee State last year to make the Commodores bowl eligible....oh wait, he lost that game.

GABE: Yes, we do realize that. He also had over 3000 yards passing and a 126 QB rating his senior year, on over 400 passing attempts in the best defensive conference in college football. And he did it all on his own, since he was, as you say, from Vanderbilt.

I know that the game is scheduled only hours from now, and Sam has already previewed the game, and some people are already pulling into the Invesco Field parking lot to start their grills, radios, and televisions - but there's something that's been missing from all of our coverage here that I want to touch on quickly. After last week's embarassing loss to the Rams, almost all blame went to the offense. Afterall, they could only manage ten points, turned the ball over five times, and stayed on the field for just 27 minutes - and yet they were still very much in the game even late in the fourth quarter, a testament to the stellar play of the defense. Wide receiver Rod Smith event went as far as apologizing to the defense for the offense's lackluster performance.

But one thing that people glance over when looking at such lopsided stats is that there were also grumblings from the defensive side of the Broncos locker room, and they weren't complaining about the offense. They were saying that their own play wasn't good enough to win the game, and so they also need to improve.

Some of this talk is just players saying the "right" things and trying to take some pressure off of their teammates. But a lot of this talk is legitimate. Even though the defense didn't allow a touchdown last Sunday, they did allow the Rams to drive straight down the field until they got a third down (the Rams were 3 for 15) or drove into the red zone. Even though they didn't score a touch down, the Rams still had 320 total yards of offense, including 125 on the ground - all but four of those yards from Stephen Jackson. These are hardly the numbers of a championship-quality defense, even in a game where they spent the majority of the time on the field, and this is the point that the guys are trying to make from the locker room. They still need to improve.

That last statistic is the one that will have the most bearing against the Chiefs in about four hours' time. With KC quarterback Trent Green out of the mix, the ball is going to be on the ground a lot - in the hands of the excellent Larry Johnson. If the defense allows Larry Johnson to run on them the way Stephen Jackson did, it's going to be a long day regardless of what the offense does. That's why defensive, not offensive improvement is going to be key to winning this afternoon.

P.S., the experts now agree with me that the loss of Willie Roaf might have a profound effect on the KC run game. Wammo!