Some thoughts on the Colorado Avalanche
I was in Denver on Tuesday, watched the Avs play Vegas. Here are my thoughts.
I went to the preseason game Tuesday night in Denver between the Colorado Avalanche and Vegas Golden Knights.
Vegas won 6-1 and out-shot Colorado 37-28, a mildly disappointing result for the Avalanche when you consider the Golden Knights effectively brought their B, if not C, squad to Denver.
Colorado also played its three biggest names — Cale Makar, Nathan MacKinnon, and Mikko Rantanen — and starting goalie Alexander Georgiev.
It’s a preseason game, the results don’t matter, but I walked away from the game thinking about how Colorado might be in trouble to start this season.
First, let’s be clear on something, I still look at Colorado as a playoff team out of the Central Division. In fact, there were parts of Tuesday’s game watching Makar, MacKinnon, and Rantanen sling the puck on the power play that were mesmerizing as a viewer.
But when you think about hockey as a weak-link sport, the Avalanche become less appetizing pick to win the division when you remember that, even at his best, MacKinnon, the reigning league MVP, is always going to spend more time on the bench than he does on the ice.
There are some natural injuries and other off-ice developments that could shift things for Colorado, but right now I’m operating under the assumption that Gabriel Landeskog and Valeri Nichushkin, at best, aren’t going to be viable consistent NHL options until late December at the earliest and Artturi Lehkonen is bigger injury than I think people realize.
I had a great conversation with Pierre-Édouard Bellemare on Tuesday morning, but the fact he’s likely going to make the Avalanche after a training camp PTO is pretty indicative to me of where Colorado is going into this season.
It’s going to be a battered, injured team, that after the first line will be more annoying than effective in the offensive zone.
And, even with all of those thoughts, it could make for some great theater with MacKinnon, who I think is somehow underrated despite the hardware he picked up last season.
I’ve written before about how MacKinnon, to me, is a modern-day Mario Lemieux, because of his raw combination of speed and power, and the incredible ability to operate with skill at top gear.
It won’t be enough to drag Colorado close to the top of the division, the Dallas Stars for example, are much too deep in my view and the Nashville Predators are a sneaky good pick to finish second.
But MacKinnon is going to be frightening.
I spoke with Rantanen about it on Tuesday, chatting with MacKinnon’s winger about how the center elevates in a sport designed to be team-first.
And for Rantanen, it’s something he partially credits to the horrific 2016-17 season in Denver. That was the year Patrick Roy effectively quit right before the season, the Avalanche had one of the worst teams in NHL history, and the Avalanche were a very rough watch before drafting Makar in the following draft.
“It’s something that if you were to go through that now, it would be horrible, as this point in my career,” Rantanen said. “But I think for Nate and me, and even for (Avalanche coach Jared Bednar) it was the kind of silver lining season that let (MacKinnon) be himself and learn how to take over and put a team on back.”
Rantanen gives Bednar a ton of credit for trusting a then 21-year-old MacKinnon to evolve, and how much of the Avalanche success — including a Stanley Cup in 2022 — is built on young players and coaches both having the space to feel disappointment and grow from it.
“Again, something you never want again, but if you can get something like that earlier in your career, it can be that lesson teams are always looking for,” Rantanen said.
So, yes, the Avalanche are in a bit of trouble this season. They won’t come out like gangbusters and they’ll have major question marks around some potential mid-season additions.
But as Rantanen put it, it’s hard to get caught up in that when the coach and on-ice driver have already seen the bottom of the NHL barrel before and instead built one of the NHL’s most successful playoff runs out of it.