(Ed. Note: There’s entirely too much sunshine in the summer. So your friends at Puck Daddy are offering a month of thrown shade and perpetual gloom. Behold, our Summer of Disappointment series, in which we ask fans of all 30 teams to recall the biggest bummer moments, teams and players in franchise history! Please wade into their misery like a freezing resort pool, and add your own choices in the comments!)

Written by Cory Caouette

Most Disappointing Team: 2010-2011 Colorado Avalanche



To this fan, there is no more disappointing season than 2010-2011.

After a surprising but impressive '09-'10 season that exhibited the promise of Joe Sacco's young team, the Avalanche continued their ascension through the first 46 games of the 2010-11 campaign. On January 18, 2011, they stood fifth in the West (24-16-6), having just defeated the hated Canucks in an overtime thriller.

Serviceable on D, they had given up 3.17 goals against, while riding the 20 year old Matt Duchene (27G, 40A) to 3.30 goals for. They were beginning to raise eyebrows across the league... and then the wheels fell off.

The final 36 games of the 2010-2011 season is possibly one of the worst stretches of hockey played by any team in NHL history. From January 18th, over nearly three months of the season, they won two of 36(!) games in regulation. They gave up four goals a game on the way to a league-worst goals against tally, and, perhaps most embarrassingly, they scored 75 goals in those final 36 games, barely over two a game.

To make matters worse, four weeks later, Craig Anderson was gone, as were two budding stars, Chris Stewart and Kevin Shattenkirk. Brian Elliott was poor, Erik Johnson worse, and it seemed like Milan Hejduk was headed the way of Peter Forsberg, whose two game comeback that season added insult to injury.

Some of those things would change, but not until a summer had passed -- a summer of disappointment the likes of which Avalanche fans had not experienced previously.



Most Disappointing Avalanche: Scott Parker



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Alright, Avs fans, bear with me on this one.

First of all, consider yourself lucky that we have had few, if any, glaring mistakes on the personnel side of the ledger -- sure the odd free agent folly (Kariya, Parenteau), draft picks who have underwhelmed (Nederost, Kuleshov), and trade returns gone by the boards (Mueller, Elliott), but there are no Bryzgalov, Leino, or Gomez signings in the team's history.



So, with that in mind, I submit to you that no other than one Scott Parker as the biggest disappointment in team history.





The 20th overall pick in 1998 (but amazingly, the fourth of four Avs picks in that first round), Parker had just come off of a WHL season where he scored 30 goals plus six in a single postseason round. Sure, he was still an enforcer, but with a nose for goal, and the skill set of one of those tough guys who could finish (think Owen Nolan). Not so in the NHL.



In 237 career games with Colorado, Parker scored five goals and accumulated 16 total points, numbers hardly befitting of a marksman in junior hockey. While Parker won a Stanley Cup with the team in 2001, he also had his contract terminated in 2008 for "insubordination."





Finally, and perhaps most disturbingly to me, he took the opportunity in a 2012 interview to bash teammate Steve Moore, the victim of the infamous Todd Bertuzzi hit, saying "you know what... blow me, college grad. I'll hit you four times right in the skull."