On this day in Colorado Avalanche history…

Happy Sunday folks, especially to all you fathers out there. Welcome to the latest subscribers to Colorado Hockey Now. Thank you. Summer officially starts in five days, but there is plenty of Avalanche news coming in the next two weeks. You know what’s coming – draft and free agency.

Occasionally, I’ll do something what I’m doing here: posting some historical stuff on the Avs. My basement is a virtual museum of team history in some ways. I have stacks and stacks of newspaper clippings from back in the day when I actually wrote for a newspaper. I also have upward or 400-500 VHS tapes of Avs games from 1995 to about 2011. Some day, I’ll get those transferred to DVD/digital.

So, as subscribers, it’s only right that you get to see some of this stuff. The picture you see up top is from a special section of the Denver Post published on this day, June 16, 1996. The Avs had won the Cup a week before, and much of my time spent in the following days was writing copy for this section.

That photo of Joe Sakic holding the Cup for the first time was shot by John Leyba, a great former photographer with the Post.

A couple more photos:

These were the player “capsules” of everyone on the Avs on the roster when the Cup was won, plus ones for Marc Crawford, Joel Quenneville and Pierre Lacroix. I’ve always loved writing player capsules, little dot-dot-dot things. There used to be a yearly publication of books about all the four major sports that had player capsules of everybody on every team, written in an insider’s style by beat writers from those teams, all edited by a man way ahead of his time named Zander Hollander. For more on him and the books, click here.  Those books were a major influence on future sports writers like me.

Remember Gart Sports?

Catchy headlines, huh? For those who are too young here, Florida Panthers fans used to throw little plastic rats on the ice after goals that year. Peter Forsberg scored a hat trick in Game 2, so the headline is “Rat Trick.” Get it?

Anybody still have one of these in their closet?