Erik Johnson

The Colorado Avalanche has a problem teams love to have: They have too many defensemen in the young variety.

Currently, the Avs have eight defensemen on their roster and two more who will be ready next year. Tyson Barrie may already be good enough. The needs the Avalanche have are scoring and wingers, and they have the pieces to bring a top player to Denver and could maybe bring back their first-round pick.

Twelve games into the regular season and the Colorado Avalanche are still without a captain. They are one of two teams that have yet to name a captain for their team (the other team being the Florida Panthers).

As Avalanche blogger Ryan Boulding put it in his first article for Mile High Sports:

The Colorado Avalanche have undoubtedly had a great start to their 2011-12 season.

There are teams that suffer from injury problems, and then there is the Colorado Avalanche.

The Avs revealed on Friday that defenseman Jan Hejda and forward Brandon Yip would be unavailable due to injuries suffered in preseason contests. This is a foreboding way to begin the 2011-12 campaign for a team that lost close to 500 man games to injury a season ago.

The countdown to the start of the NHL regular season really begins to pick up now that teams are reporting back to duty for training camp.

Excitement has begun to pick up for each team for the 2011-2012 NHL regular season, and the Colorado Avalanche are no different.

The Avalanche are a team that have made a lot of changes over the summer in an attempt to make a jump in the standings.

The Avalanche are looking to turn the page on what was an incredibly disappointing season.

Things got off to a great start with the drafting of Gabriel Landeskog and Duncan Siemens. The positives continued when the Avalanche put together a very solid goaltending duo of Semyon Varlamov and Jean-Sebastien Giguere.

Signing strong defenders Jan Hejda and Shane O'Brien to the team showed the the Avalanche are committed to getting bigger and stronger.

The NHL has a notoriously late trading deadline considering it comes with only 20 games left in the season, so teams in the thick of the playoff hunt have not wasted any time getting the guys they wanted a few days before February 28.  

So how have the fantasy values of the big-name players that were traded in the past two weeks changed now that they are on different teams?  Here is a look at whose fantasy values have shot up, dropped down and stayed the same post-trade.     

Erik Johnson was sent to the Colorado Avalanche along with Jay McClement in exchange for Chris Stewart and Kevin Shattenkirk.

In just their second game for the Avs, Johnson and McClement returned to St. Louis to face the Blues.

Last night's make-up game against the St. Louis Blues became the first win for the Colorado Avalanche since the All-Star Break.  The victory also snapped a ten game losing streak, the longest since the franchise moved from Quebec to Colorado.

The win itself, while obviously a positive for a team who had been finding ways to lose games rather than win them, was great to see, but there were a couple other things that struck as huge positive takeaways for the Avs. 

Note: I originally wrote this piece for SportsHaze.com, but technical difficulties have prevented it from posting there. Due to the soon-to-be-dated nature of the piece, I am posting it here instead.