Yeah, the 2022 cup team might be finished after a single season. Given the numerous injuries, flaky performances, and just general flat play that led to the 1st round shock defeat to the Seattle Kraken, the Colorado Avalanche are seriously looking at a mini retool for next season.
I guess Joe Sakic and Chris MacFarland’s days of ripping off other GMs, building super teams, and signing franchise superstar players to team-friendly deals are coming to an end.
I don’t think I’m the only one who will say that the 2022 Stanley Cup Champion Colorado Avalanche going out in the 1st round to the newly created Seattle Kraken franchise due to a stinker of a performance in Game 7 (at home, remember) is one of the biggest shocks of the 2023 postseason. Right? Well, then this shouldn’t come as a surprise when I say this Avalanche team is on the verge of collapse and desperately needs a retool to prevent disaster.
“Wow, that’s a massive overreaction!” some die-hard Avalanche fans are probably blurting out right now after reading that last sentence.
And, under normal circumstances, I’d agree with them as this is still the team stewarding the Stanley Cup (for another month or so), it finished 1st in the Central Division, 2nd in the Western Conference, 7th in the entire NHL, has the reigning Norris trophy and Conn Smythe winner (Cal Makar), has two 100+ point scorers (Nathan MacKinnon, Mikko Rantanen), and has four of the Top-40 best players (Makar, MacKinnon, Rantanen, Gabe Landeskog) in the league on the team.
How is this team in a dire need of a retool? This loss to the Kraken was an aberration, not a reflection of the team’s Stanley Cup potential. Right?
Well, I obviously don’t agree as if you look a tad bit deeper into this franchise, you’ll see there’s an ever-growing pit of doom growing.
What is this malignant pit? Injuries, regression, and salary cap issues,
Starting off with the obvious, the Colorado Avalanche currently have only $140k of free cap space to spend on their roster, while J.T. Compher (cap hit: $3.5M), Lars Eller ($2.42M), Evan Rodrigues ($2M), Darren Helm ($1.25M), Andrew Cogliano ($1.25M), Matt Nieto (850k), Alex Newhook ($900k), Denis Malgin ($750k), Erik Johnson ($6M), Jack Johnson ($950k), and Bowen Byram ($900k) are all out of contract this season.
And, only five players (Mikko Rantanen: 82, J.T. Compher: 82, Alex Newhook: 82, Logan O’Connor: 82, Devon Toews: 80) on the Avalanche played in at least 80 games this season, while 13 starting roster players played in 70 games or less. Obviously, these facts are not great for the longevity of the team.
Now, of course, a lot of these players I listed will either move in in free agency (ex: Lars Eller, Matt Nieto, Evan Rodrigues) and other will take huge pay reductions to stay (Erik Johnson), so it’s theoretically possible some of that $8Mish of free cap space will be used to pay for the big raises guys like Byram, Newhook, and maybe Compher will make.
Well…actually there’s going to be a bit of a problem as Nathan MacKinnon, who had taken team-friendly contract for years and was only making $6.3M this season, is set to earn a whopping $12.3M/year for the next eight seasons as a part of the $100.8M contract extension he signed last November. So, almost all of that new cap space is going to be invested in one extremely important, but still a sole player.
However, there is another option to free up some cap space for the Avalanche: placing team captain Gabe Landeskog on long-term injury reserve.
With Landeskog missing the entirety of last season and set to miss all of the 2023/24 season due to a knee cartilage replacement surgery (yeah, he’s in rough shape), President of Hockey Operations Joe Sakic and GM Chris MacFarland have the option to put all of the captain’s $7M 2023/24 salary on IR and use it on these key depth players.
Of course, this is not the best option as Landeskog (in my opinion) is one of the Top-40 best players in the league, the team’s captain, and the longest serving player on the Avalanche (he’s been on the team since 2011), but at least the Avs can keep some of their depth pieces for the upcoming season with Landeskog’s salary on hold. Problem solved…sort of.
The biggest reason why the Avalanche got beat by a Kraken team that entered the playoffs as the 7th seed in the West in the first was due to the team’s overreliance on the superstars, and the depth scorers just not doing anything in the playoffs, such as Compher, Byram, Eller, Nichushkin, Girard, Newhook, etc., so spending all of their available cap space on the same core of players just reinforces the issue that doomed this team in the first place.
Colorado desperately needs some added depth to the second and third lines to go on another Stanley Cup run, but their current cap space situation is so dicey that making such moves is impossible without trading away one of the key contributors (ex: Devon Toews: $4.1M, Josh Manson: $4.5M, Valeri Nichushkin: $6.25M, Samuel Girard: $5M, Artturi Lehkonen: $4.5M). This team literally is stuck in cap hell!
Perhaps the Avalanche aren’t doomed in the immediate future, but their hopes for another Stanley Cup most definitely are if Joe Sakic and Chris MacFarland cannot figure out this cap space and injury crisis.
PS: Would someone please tell Nichushkin to keep women and booze out his hotel rooms during the playoffs. The Avs already have enough headaches.
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