Early Season Look In: Avs Struggle Early While Shouldering Cup Expectations
Quite a few of the NHL’s expected contenders are off to slow starts this season. Among them is last year’s Presidents’ Trophy winner, the Colorado Avalanche.
The Avs had a challenging offseason, as a tight salary cap ultimately resulted in them having to let go of Vezina Trophy finalist Philipp Grubauer and underrated defender Ryan Graves. They also lost solid forwards Brandon Saad (free agency) and Joonas Donskoi (Expansion Draft).
Still, despite those losses, Colorado came into 2021-22 as one of the teams expected to contend for the Stanley Cup. So far, they haven’t really looked the part. The Avs are 3-4-0 and they’re struggling at both ends of the ice.
What’s happened so far in 2021-22…
The Avs went 39-13-4 in 2021 and won the Presidents’ Trophy for the league’s best record, holding a tiebreaker with the Vegas Golden Knights by virtue of having more wins in regulation.
This was a team that did everything well.
The Avalanche finished first in the league with 197 goals, they were third with 133 goals against, and they were above average on both the power play and penalty kill. Colorado boasted elite star power, as it had a finalist for the Hart, Norris and Vezina Trophy, and had a roster fleshed out with quality depth.
As great as all of that was, the Avs wound up losing in the second round of the playoffs.
They cruised through the first round, pushing aside the St. Louis Blues in a four-game sweep. Their playoff winning streak extended to six games (11 games if you go back to the regular season) as they went up 2-0 over the Golden Knights, but Vegas stormed back with four consecutive wins to take the series.
Colorado is back in the Central Division in 2021-22, which is a bit of a different animal from last year’s West Divison.
The West was top-heavy last year with a pair of contenders in Colorado and Vegas and a high-quality breakout opponent in the Minnesota Wild. But, beneath them was a bunch of junk. The Blues were a middling team and Los Angeles, San Jose, Anaheim and Arizona weren’t at all close to being playoff contenders.
The Central, on the other hand, is deep and competitive. The Coyotes are in the basement and the Chicago Blackhawks are a mess, but everyone else has legitimate playoff aspirations. The Avs are most certainly going to be a playoff team, but winning this division and coming out of it in the playoffs won’t be easy.
And, ultimately, that’s the goal for Colorado. Anything sort of reaching the Stanley Cup Final would be a letdown.
It’s only been six games, but, as I said earlier, Colorado hasn’t looked the part early on.
The depth scoring that made their offense so lethal last season hasn’t showed up yet and the goaltending has been shaky. Getting Devon Toews back from injury will certainly help, but the Avs need the likes of Andrei Burakovsky to start scoring and for Darcy Kuemper to start stopping pucks. Even Nathan MacKinnon, who has one goal through five games, is off to a surprisingly slow start.
Now, to be fair to Colorado, they’ve had a difficult schedule thus far, which could be a contributor to their slow start. They won their first game of the season against the mess that is the Blackhawks and, since then, they’ve played exclusively high-quality teams: St. Louis, Washington, Florida, Tampa Bay and Vegas. Their next game is against another tough opponent, the Minnesota Wild.
Surely this group will find its groove sooner rather than later. I mean, they have to, because the Central doesn’t offer much room for error.
Players to watch…
How Kuemper handles playing for a legitimate contender is an interesting storyline in Colorado.
Though he had a down year playing for a miserable Coyotes team in 2021, he’s had some very good seasons in the past, which is why the Avs were willing to pay a high price to acquire him as the replacement for Grubauer in their net.
Through five games, Kuemper has a .900 save percentage, which certainly isn’t ideal. It takes some time for goalies to adjust to new environments (just look at how Grubauer is going in Seattle) so we can cut Kuemper some slack.
The hope for Kuemper is that he heats up, grabs Team Canada’s starting goalie gig at the Olympics in February, and earns himself a big contract in free agency in the offseason.
Another name to watch on Colorado is Bowen Byram, who might become the Avs’ second Calder Trophy winner in three years. Cale Makar, another former No. 4 overall pick, won top rookie honours back in 2020, and the hope is that Byram can follow in his footsteps.
Byram was solid in his debut last season, logging 17:31 per night over the course of 19 games. The Avs largely used him in sheltered minutes and he didn’t play for the team in the playoffs, but the debut was more than enough to show that Byram was ready to play in the NHL.
So far this season, Byram is averaging 19:36 per game and he has five points in six games with a ridiculously impressive 57.4 per cent shot attempt differential at even strength. Byram stepping up and having a big season would be huge for the Avs because they need somebody to replace Ryan Graves, who was a salary-cap casualty in the offseason.
What did they do in the offseason?
Notable Additions: Darcy Kuemper, Ryan Murray, Jack Johnson, Kurtis MacDermid, Darren Helm, Mikhail Maltsev.
Notable Subtractions: Philipp Grubauer, Ryan Graves, Brandon Saad, Joonas Donskoi, Pierre-Edouard Bellemare, Conor Timmins.
Colorado came into the summer with a few key players set to hit the open market.
They were able to keep captain Gabriel Landeskog around on an eight-year deal worth $7 million annually, but Grubauer walked to the Seattle Kraken and Brandon Saad joined the Blues. There just wasn’t enough cap room to go around after Norris runner-up Cale Makar inked a contract worth $9,000,000 annually.
Another reality of being a deep team was a difficult Expansion Draft situation. The Avs were going to have to expose a quality player to Seattle, so they got out in front of it and traded Ryan Graves to the New Jersey Devils for prospect Mikhail Maltsev and a second-round pick. Joonas Donskoi, who scored 17 goals in 2021, wound up being Seattle’s selection.
Colorado paid a hefty price to replace Grubauer, sending Conor Timmins and a first-round pick to Arizona for Kuemper and they signed Ryan Murray to help fill the hole Graves left on the blueline. They didn’t have the cash available to replace veterans Saad and Donskoi in free agency, so the hope was that somebody internal, like Tyson Jost or Martin Kaut, would be able to do so.
The Avs will again have some difficult decisions to make next summer. Kadri and Burakovsky are both set to become free agents and Colorado will need to give Kuemper a substantial raise in order to keep him around if he has a good season.
Speaking of raises, it’s also important to note that Nathan MacKinnon only has one more year left after this one on his hilariously team-friendly contract worth $6.3 million annually.
One bold prediction…
The Avs will bounce back from the poor start but they won’t be able to get through the Central Division gauntlet. They wind up losing to the Winnipeg Jets in the playoffs.
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