Maybe during Joe Sakic's long-expected and frankly overdue move up the hall to the GM's office, the memo received by every other team in the league got lost in the shuffle.

Maybe it fell in with all the early drafts of resignation letters Greg Sherman wrote before Patrick Roy came in and told him it was time he went on another Starbucks run for everyone at the office.

Maybe the guy in charge of bringing in that fax was also the one in charge of making a reasonable offer to Paul Stastny.

Whatever the reason, though, the memo that everyone else got this summer — “The nerds won. Give it up.” — has not made it to the Pepsi Center.

Yes, it's time for another “The Avs aren't good enough to outplay their possession problems” column, this time spurred by spurious claims made in the Denver Post and to Yahoo's own Nick Cotsonika as to the team's ability to continue racking up seasons of 100-plus points in perpetuity despite the fact that they absolutely and positively cannot.

Let's think a little bit, first, about the way Las Vegas operates. People travel there looking to have fun, sure, but many go there thinking they can make money. They think they have the formula to crack whatever code it is the casinos have created to build up their massive monuments to excess, opulence, and human misery. And while a few guys do leave a couple thousand dollars richer, maybe more, most gamblers head back just like everyone else: Short on money and long on regret.

Such is, or perhaps one should say “will inevitably be,” the case for the Avalanche. The math all checks out: Teams simply cannot sustain score-close possession percentages south of 50 percent and PDOs north of 102. To claim otherwise is to say that the math we've compiled over nearly a decade is wrong, and you are right.

Which is what the Avalanche say, really. The crux of the argument for their success, which they're more than happy to advance, is that Patrick Roy has figured out something which literally hundreds of NHL coaches have not in the past several years: How to sustain play which has otherwise been found to be wholly unsustainable.

There's no doubting that in the first year under their new coach, they were able to generate quality chances when they do get relatively few shots (which keeps their own shooting percentage high), and suppress opponent chances effectively so that even though they're getting more of them a smaller percentage is actually troubling their netminder (which keeps their team save percentage high as well). But how many times have hockey fans since, let's say, 2010 or so, heard a team assert that yes, they know they give up a ton of shots and everything, but they have the ability to do those two things reliably enough that they're going to be able to do it forever?

The answer is “about one per season.”

Literally. Stop me if you've heard this before, but the 2009-10 Colorado Avalanche started out the year very well, going 40-23-6 in their first 69 games, good for fifth in the West at the time. Getting 86 points from your first 69 games puts you on pace for a little more than 102 points for the season, which is very, very good. But because their luck had run out and their fenwick through 69 was 45.5 percent (26th in the NHL), they then lost 10 of their final 13 games, and went from a playoff lock to barely making it and then getting demolished by San Jose in the first round.

And prior that year-end correction, Colorado's score-close PDO for the year was 102.4, second-highest in the league (that number and all following courtesy War on Ice's fantastic stats-by-date tool). All the bloviating about the team being able to hold things up really didn't work out so well, simply because time passed and it became increasingly unlikely that they'd be able to keep the juddering ship from breaking apart.

A year later, the Dallas Stars were in much the same boat. They began the season 29-13-5 (63 points in 47 games, a pace for 110 points or so) and were on top of the world. Their PDO at the time was 102.9, tops among all NHL clubs, while their fenwick was 25th at 46.5. They were also fifth in the league standings, and third in the West. Then they lost two straight, then four straight, then five straight, then six straight. They finished the year with just 95 points, winning just 13 of their final 35 (PDO during the collapse was 99.4). They peaked very early, indeed, and their season ended up out of the playoffs and definitively in ruins, while everyone looked around wondering what had happened to them. Except the nerds who said the Stars were cruising for this all season.

Story continues