Blog View: The Avalanche Guild is starving
One Colorado Avalanche blog has the potential to set its self apart.
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Denver has a great Sports Blog scene. Blog View is a series profiling some of the sites that enhance our experience as fans.
Like the team it faithfully covers, The Avalanche Guild is hungry. The writers who contribute to it, Ryan Boulding and Kevin Goff, are excellent – some of the most knowledgeable among the many Avalanche bloggers in the area. Trouble is, they do all their best work for other sites.
Ryan Boulding (@avsguildryan) contributes to a weekly column Mile High Sports. His articles are wonderfully well-written, thoughful and informative. Ryan most recently wrote about the keys to an Avalanche late-season playoff push. In researching for this review of the Avalanche Guild I found myself pouring back through MHS’s archives of Ryan’s writings and reading them top-to-bottom. He’s friggin’ good.
Kevin Goff (@avsguildkevin) is a featured columnist for Bleacher Report. He writes the Avalanche as well as the NHL as a whole. B/R affords Kevin exposure that the Avalanche Guild can’t. In his most recent post he analyzed the team’s trade-deadline dealings.
Like Boulding, Goff knows the Avalanche like the back of his hand and writes solid stuff about them. Just not for his own site.
The Avalanche Guild illustrates the blogger’s dilemma. If you’re good enough the bigger guys in the business will publish your stuff. In some cases, they will even toss a few bucks your way. But, if you contribute to their sites your own blog gets short-changed.
The Avalanche Guild’s strength is game recaps. Kevin puts a bow on every match-up with his take on why the Avs won or lost. He mixes facts about the games with a reasonable serving of opinion. Boulding’s function is primarily to provide commentary. Unfortunately, Ryan’s “real job” doesn’t afford him as much keyboard time as he would like to have. It’s difficult enough for him to meet his MHS deadlines, much less to punch out 1500 word pieces for his own site. Still, he contributes roughly two strong items per week.
My favorite thing that the Avalanche Guild is involved with is the Burgundy Brigade. The Brigade was once a blog of its own that the Guild “absorbed” and tranformed into an unofficial Avalanche fan club. It’s a really cool idea. The Brigade’s mission is:
To inject passion and enthusiasm into Pepsi Center and the local Avalanche fan base by initiating grassroots and interactive events through The Avalanche Guild. Formed in the Spring of 2011 by four fans, the Burgundy Brigade joined The Avs Guild over the summer to create a haven for loud, proud, passionate hockey fans to enjoy the Avalanche experience together.
The idea is to bring groups of fans to “games of the month” to sit and cheer together in once section. The Brigade negotiates to offer members discounted game tickets. They also provide uller helmets to members who will “wear it proudly”.
As the Avalanche current season sunk into a tailspin the games of the month sadly lost steam. The idea has great potential, though, and Ryan Boulding told me that the Guild plans on re-stoking it. It would be wise for Kroenke Sports and Tickethorse to strongly encourage the idea.
Another feature of the Avalanche Guild I admire is its links page. It’s referred to as the “Blogger Network” and it offers click-throughs to other great hockey blogs including Mile High Hockey, JibbleScribbits, Real Denver Sports and several other must-visit sites.
The Avalanche Guild is part of a group of hockey sites created by Justin Goldman, am independent talent scout and expert on goal tenders. Goldman offers professional scouting services and consulting. He also maintains a site called the Goalie Guild which is a hockey nerd paradise.
Much like the Avalanche themselves, the Avalanche Guild boasts some impressive talent. It has a bright future. If Ryan Boulding and Kevin Goff brought the same energy to it that they do to Mile High Sports and Bleacher Report it would be far and away the top Avs site.
It’s not their blog, though, It belongs to Justin Goldman. Perhaps if it were theirs they wouldn’t be as inclined to expend their talents elsewhere. Or, perhaps if the site were generating some advertising revenue it could pay the duo.
I would love to see them both offering their best work in the same place at the sime time. If they could add a third and even a fourth contributor the could easily be to the Avalanche what Denver Stiffs is to the Nuggets.
