From the absolute bottom to the Stanley Cup in just five years. Colorado’s success proves that even the club that everyone in NHL hockey makes fun of can finally have the last laugh.
When the Avalanche finished 2016/17 with 48 points and 29.3 percent shooting, they got a lot of attention from the regional media.
“Colorado’s awful season just ended. Wait… It wasn’t just awful. It was historically awful. Downright toxic,” chimed in the Denver Post before going into detail.
Frustration also radiated from the hockey players themselves, who finished 21 points behind the second worst team, understandably already during the regular season. “We play like juniors,” said team captain Gabriel Landeskog after one game.
The symbolic peak of the disaster came at the end of the year. At 0:5, forward Blake Comeau shot alone at Winnipeg’s goal, but inexplicably instead of finishing chose to record backwards, which was caught by the opponent. “I don’t think we’ll ever see anything like this again,” marveled the broadcast commentator. The rest of the league had fun.
The legendary Joe Sakic, then in his third year as the Avalanche’s general manager, wondered if he should be doing something else.
“I remember mornings when I got up and thought, ‘Oh my God, it can’t get any worse.’ “Subconsciously, I thought the owners could cut it for me. With the way we played, no one could blame them for letting me go,” said Sakic, who captained Colorado to Stanley Cup titles in 1996 and 2001. .
However, club owner Stan Kroenke and his son Josh, who is also a board member, have shown patience. Knowing that scrounging at the bottom can eventually pay off in the NHL, thanks to the draft. Although the lottery sometimes shuffles the cards, the general rule is that the worse the team, the better the position in the talent auction.
“That’s how we got (Cale) Makar or (Bowen) Byram. That’s how it works. You always try to win, but sometimes you just have to go through tough times to get to the players that end up winning you a Stanley Cup,” Sakic said.
Already in the aforementioned disastrous season, the Avalanche played with Nathan MacKinnon, the number one pick in the 2013 draft. Mikko Rantanen and Landeskog were also headed for the peak of their careers.
“We had superstars coming up; it was just a matter of building a team around them and adding a few more props,” Sakic said.
He did a great job as a builder. In exchange, he brought in Nazem Kadri, later a key sophomore center, and productive linebacker Devon Toews. On the free market, he caught the winger Valerij Ničushkin, who – although many did not believe in him – gradually brightened up.
Shortly before this year’s playoffs, Sakic brought forward Artturi Lehkonen, the scorer of the decisive goal in the final against Tampa. In short, one masterpiece after another.
But now the Canadian legend has to deal with the flip side of success. The team is “falling apart”. Goalie Darcy Kuemper is out of contract as well as Kadri, Nichuškin, Lehkonen or another offensive star André Burakovsky.
Sakic can spend between $20 million and $30 million, but his hands are pretty much tied considering that he will also have to add significantly to MacKinnon and running back Byram, who is still on a modest rookie contract, in a year. In other words – some supports will go away.
In the salary cap era that began in 2005, this is a natural process. A dominant team is difficult for managers to hold together.
Colorado can look back on the pre-lockout era with a tear in its eye. It entered the NHL after moving from Quebec, Canada in the 1995/96 season. And it immediately won the Stanley Cup.
In order to keep the pedaling team going, more and more money was pumped into it. At the next triumph five years later, it was paying almost two and a half times more.
In 2004, immediately before the lockout, the Avalanche’s budget exceeded 63 million, almost a hundred million in today’s prices. Peter Forsberg was the best paid player of the team and, together with Jaromír Jágr, of the entire league. He was earning 11 million, adjusted for inflation today 17.
Let us remind you that the salary cap for next year is 82.5 million and the best paid hockey player in the league is Connor McDavid with 12.5 million.
No one can afford luxury like Colorado before the lockout. It is no coincidence that in the first nine years of the Avalanche’s existence, when they were not limited by the salary cap, they advanced to the conference finals six times and won the Stanley Cup twice. They made the playoffs every time.
They paid their players about three times more than the most modest team of the time, Nashville. Now, according to the rules, the “poor man” must cross the salary floor and have a player worth at least 61 million dollars on the payroll.
Performance differences are thus blurred. If you don’t count rookie Seattle, the worst club in the salary cap era in 17 years is Edmonton, which lost over 45 percent of regular season games after 60 minutes.
In the 17 years before the lockout, nine teams were even worse off.
The NHL has leveled off and from the absolute bottom you can fly up to the Stanley Cup relatively quickly. Detroit, which fell even lower than Colorado two years ago and finished the season with 39 points and 27.5 percent shooting, could easily be the next rocket.
–
