Avs Talk - A Colorado Avalanche Blog

The reason for JM Liles getting minimal playing time in the third and OT against Minnesota has become public. On the blocked shot I mentioned in my post-game, he actually broke his left foot. So he has been placed on the IR and will be out approximately 4 weeks. This is a fairly big blow to the Avs defense as they already have Leopold on the IR and Brisebois out with a back injury.

So this leaves the Avs with the following defensemen:
Clark-Skrastins
Sauer-Cumiskey
Klee-Vaananen

It's not exactly a stellar cast though of each of those players have been doing their part as of late. The question now is two-fold. Will the Avs call someone up from the AHL such as Johnny Boychuk or Jeff Finger, or will they jump right into the trade market? If I were to put money on it, I'd say that out of those two, I'd prefer they call up another AHL player and sit tight until their D is healthy again.

Brisebois should be back soon as he was always listed as day-to-day, Leopold may come back soon as stated by Giguere briefly in an interview, and Liles will be back in a month leaving plenty of time for the stretch run. Of course, the Northwest is a division that would be hard to recover from if you drop much in the standings at this point so this may put Giguere into a bit of panic mode to ensure that doesn't happen.

There is also the possibility that they do nothing, which I guess makes the question three-fold but who's counting. They still have 6 d-men on the roster and have only been rolling with 7 since it was working for them. Now, they might just tone it back to 6 and get more forwards back into the lineup and see how it works out for a couple games before making any decision. That's a fine course of action by me as there's little point jumping the gun right away on a trade or call-up.

If we've seen anything from Giguere so far, it's that he appears to be a fairly patient man.