News Avalanche Team Notes

[Colorado Avalanche]

Preview: It’s Nordiques vs. Whalers at Ball Arena

Well, folks, the long-anticipated wait is finally over. The teasing and trolling are over, and we have the new Nordiques Jersey. The first game they will see comes against the Hartford Whalers, or as they are currently known, the Carolina Hurricanes. This game doesn’t just set up as a sight for sore eyes because of the threads and nostalgic aesthetics, but also because these two teams are good. Let’s put it this way: they might look like NHLers from the early ’90s, but this game will be played at a much higher pace.

A clash of the classics pic.twitter.com/pneMKyraEV

— Carolina Hurricanes (@Canes) October 23, 2025

Colorado Avalanche: 5-0-2​

The Opponent: Carolina Hurricanes 5-1-0

Time: 7:00 p.m. MT

Watch: Altitude, Altitude+, ESPN+

Listen: Altitude Sports Radio, 92.5 FM

Quebec Nordiques (Colorado Avalanche)​

The Avalanche were a bit disappointed in their performance last time out against a seemingly pesky and tenacious Utah Mammoth club. That might be true, but stealing a point and remaining unbeaten in regulation seven games into the season is among the more idealistic ways to begin a season.

Colorado lost in part due to a controversial offside ruling by referees and Toronto NHL HQ alike when Gabe Landeskog’s first regulation goal in three years was taken off the board. The NHL spent a good chunk of time and effort on Wednesday, detracting fans who weren’t satisfied with, “Nichushkin’s actions forced the Utah player to put it back into his own end.” Jared Bednar had this to say regarding the ruling, “It’s bogus… I think they got it wrong.” He also called it nonsense, and I tend to agree.

Let’s see if Landeskog and the whole second line can get back on the scoresheet tonight against Carolina, who will test Colorado’s depth just like any other Stanley Cup Contender.

We will get to see Scott Wedgewood’s throwback goalie gear tonight, which will be awesome. I have said this in many different ways in all of my previews so far this season—Scott Wedgewood is good. The Avalanche is currently allowing the fewest goals per game (1.86 GAA), and seeing as no one else has even gotten a start between the pipes, that’s all, Scott, who currently holds the NHL’s fourth-best save percentage (.927) as well.

Last thing I’ll add, and I’ll be quick. Let the Marty Party roll on and let it roll against his former club!

Projected Lineup:​

Artturi Lehkonen — Nathan MacKinnon — Martin Necas
Gabe Landeskog — Brock Nelson — Valeri Nichushkin
Ross Colton — Jack Drury — Viktor Olofsson
Parker Kelly — Zakhar Bardakov — Gavin Brindley

Devon Toews — Cale Makar
Josh Manson — Brent Burns
Ilya Solovyov — Sam Malinski

Scott Wedgewood
Trent Miner

Hartford Whalers (Carolina Hurricanes)​

As mentioned, the Hurricanes are a great team and a solid litmus test for the Avalanche, as hopes of a long playoff run and cup quest feel more and more legitimized. The Hurricanes are all about puck possession, as Jackie Kay mentioned in this week’s edition of the Mile High Hockey Lab, so we should key on that part of the game early, given that Colorado similarly prioritizes puck possession.

This game could get spicy and has the potential for a pseudo-rivalry, as many fans of the two clubs are at odds over the Mikko Rantanen and Martin Necas/Jack Drury trade. Brent Burns, also formerly of the Carolina Hurricanes, will be honored ahead of tonight’s game for his 1,500th career NHL contest as well. Any revenge-game scenario can play into the formation of a rivalry, but I say “pseudo” because the two won’t play much due to conference alignment.

Carolina is off to a good start themselves with just the one regulation loss in their first six games, which came on Monday at the hands of the Mitch Marner-led Vegas Golden Knights. Seth Jarvis, Sebastian Aho, and Shayne Gostisbehere are the point leaders in Carolina, and they’ve added K’Andre Miller to their back end, who has 4 points in six games so far.

A classic matchup between two franchises hits the ice tonight at Ball Arena.

Be there pic.twitter.com/SLWn6xQE4o

— Colorado Avalanche (@Avalanche) October 23, 2025

Projected Lineup:​

Nikolaj Ehlers — Sebastian Aho — Seth Jarvis
Taylor Hall — Logan Stankoven — Jackson Blake
William Carrier — Jordan Staal — Jordan Martinook
Andrei Svechnikov — Jesperi Kotkaniemi — Eric Robinson

K’Andre Miller — Sean Walker
Alexander Nikishin — Jalen Chatfield
Mike Reilly — Charles-Alexis Legault

Frederik Andersen
Pyotr Kochetkov

let’s go BACK IN TIME!

Source: https://www.milehighhockey.com/colo...review-its-nordiques-vs-whalers-at-ball-arena

 

[Colorado Avalanche]

How the pandemic helped Colorado win the Stanley Cup

One of the most popular talking points from the Colorado Avalanche front office in recent years has been how the pandemic has hamstrung their roster building efforts and ability to retain much of their 2022 Stanley Cup winning squad. But is that really the case?

Chris MacFarland on building out the Avalanche roster over the last few years:

“COVID hurt us — there’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it.”#GoAvsGo | @gs_off_ice pic.twitter.com/eu8feZxPjw

— Guerilla Sports (@guerillasports_) October 6, 2025

Building a Champion

First, let’s examine how the 2022 Stanley Cup champion Avalanche took advantage of the challenging landscape of the pandemic and three years of a flat $81.5M salary cap to fortify their roster worthy of winning a championship.

It all starts on the back of a major competitive advantage that the Avalanche held as their superstar Nathan MacKinnon was on a $6.3M average annual value contract through the 2022-23 season. The organization was able to utilize the extra salary cap space by investing in a lot of other contracts including most notably one of their most successful strategies which was targeting undervalued arbitration eligible Restricted Free Agents in trades. This blueprint began in 2019 with the Andre Burakovsky trade from Washington but the strategy really accelerated during the flat-cap environment caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Avalanche front office’s crowning achievement may have been on October 12, 2020 when Colorado extracted Devon Toews from the New York Islanders just two days after he filed for arbitration. No doubt the flat $81.5M salary cap made an impact on the Islanders who were forced to let a valuable piece go before the 2020-21 season began and in fact Toews wasn’t the only defenseman in the league hastily moved that offseason. Colorado gave Toews a nice raise from the $700K he was previously earning to $4.1M over the next four years coinciding with their championship window.

Also in that fall of 2020 as the widespread uncertainty and diminished ability for teams to spend played a hand in Colorado signing both Andre Burakovsky ($4.9M) and Val Nichushkin ($2.5M) to moderate raises, which they were both under contract at when they lifted the Stanley Cup. Similarly, when both Gabriel Landeskog ($7M) and Cale Makar ($9M) signed their seven-year contracts in the summer of 2021, the Avalanche enjoyed the benefits of flat cap cost savings then as well.

In the spring of 2022 was when the Avalanche put the finishing touches on their successful RFA strategy with the trade deadline addition of Artturi Lehkonen. It was unusual to pry away a player with team control months before the offseason. But the Canadiens decided Lehkonen had priced himself out of Montreal to the benefit of Colorado. The Avalanche knew Lehkonen was due a raise upcoming that summer on his previous salary of $2.3M on a two-year contract.

The Aftermath

Now the argument is the NHL’s flat cap then in turn prevented the Avalanche from retaining the bulk of their championship roster. It’s true that tough choices have to eventually be made for every team that has built a contender. But a hypothetical salary cap that had continued to rise had there not been a pandemic isn’t an just easy solution with free get-out-of-jail money as the salaries would have continued to inflate along with the cap. Additionally, in the 2022 offseason the cap actually wasn’t flat as it began to move up by $1M annually as the league was emerging from the pande at that time ahead of the 2022-23 season with more growth expected on the horizon.

For the Avalanche, they still invested in long term contracts that summer after winning the Stanley Cup. Nichushkin signed his long-term extension in the 2022 offseason for $6.125M per year for eight years right before he walked onto the open market. The other big ticket signing was for the previously mentioned Lehkonen just a couple days later at $4.5M for five years. And despite the slowly rising cap at the time the Avalanche still found the $4.5M to retain defenseman Josh Manson for the next four years. All three contract values would certainly have been higher had the cap not been set at $82.5M for the 2022-23 season.

The greatest beneficiary to the Avalanche of all may have been signing their franchise cornerstone superstar center Nathan MacKinnon to his eight-year deal at $12.6M per year, which was the highest AAV contract in the league when he signed it on September 20, 2022. We don’t even need to do math to figure that had there not been three seasons of a pandemic depressed flat salary cap at $81.5M that someone else would have set the league’s highest AAV beyond Connor McDavid’s $12.5M which Colorado would have to beat to give MacKinnon the highest contract value. Even if the highest yearly contract wasn’t the ultimate goal, Nathan MacKinnon would have easily been paid more had there not been a pause on cap growth by the pandemic.

In the four years before the pandemic the NHL salary cap had risen 14% from $71.4M in 2015-16 to $81.5M in 2019-20. If that same rate of growth occurred from that cap to the 2023-24 season when MacKinnon’s new deal kicked in he would have been negotiating off of roughly a $93M cap. Assuming then if he received the same 15.09% of the cap, which he signed in the aforementioned 2022 deal, his salary would have came out to $14.03M starting the 2023-24 season. Still a bargain considering where financials are going today but certainly a greater cost to the franchise. Furthermore, had the NHL experienced these recent jumps of $8-9M growth over the three pandemic years instead of the at the time projected modest $2-3M increases then MacKinnon might have easily cashed in at $17 million long before Kirill Kaprizov did. That jump simply doesn’t give the Avalanche more money to play with, it increases their expenses.

The true argument really is about Nazem Kadri and would the Avalanche have had their second line center for the last three years of early playoff exits following their Stanley Cup win had there been no flat cap? Again, the $7M and 8.48% of the cap he signed for with the Calgary Flames in 2022 would have been at least 10 percent higher had the salary cap continued to rise modestly. Would Colorado have had the appetite to pay that regardless? It seemed as they always made a calculated decision to move on from a beloved but inconsistent player past his age 30 season who increased his production from 32 points to 87 in a contract year. Had they known the repeated failures, wasted assets and big investments the organization would experience in the years since moving on from Kadri perhaps they might have evaluated the decision differently. But don’t blame it on COVID.

Source: https://www.milehighhockey.com/colo...-pandemic-helped-colorado-win-the-stanley-cup

 

[Colorado Avalanche]

Preview: A Saturday Afternoon To-Do is a Bruin Redux for the Avs

The Colorado Avalanche have been served a steady diet of Eastern Conference opponents here in the fledgling stages of the 2025-2026 season. Today, they go for seconds in Boston against the Bruins to kick off the first half of a back-to-back set this weekend.

Colorado Avalanche (5-0-3)​

The Opponent: Boston Bruins (3-6-0)

Time: 1:00 P.M. MDT/3:00 P.M. EDT

Watch: ALT, NESN, NHLN

Listen: Altitude Sports Radio KKSE-FM 92.5 FM

Colorado Avalanche​

Heading into their previous match-up last Saturday at Ball Arena, the Avalanche were looking to break a three game losing streak against Boston. Things didn’t look promising early on, as John Beecher gave Boston a lead just over three minutes into the first period. However, a two goal outing from Nathan MacKinnon and a three point effort from Artturi Lehkonen would power the Avalanche to a 4-1 victory. The Avs held the Bruins to a paltry seven shots on goal through the second and third period combined, and extended their unbeaten streak against the Eastern Conference on home ice to eight games.

The Avalanche had been playing some very impressive hockey coming into this past week, so a drop-off in their game was bound to happen sooner or later. They dug holes for themselves against the Utah Mammoth this past Tuesday, and again this past Thursday against the Carolina Hurricanes. With the Avs trailing in the third period in both games, Martin Nečas and Valeri Nichushkin provided tying goals against Utah and Carolina, respectively, where opportunities to secure victory were there for the taking. Unfortunately, the Avs couldn’t complete the comeback in both games, culminating in an abrupt overtime loss to Utah and a shootout loss to Carolina.

Despite playing some of their worst hockey to this point in the season, there were some positives that the Avalanche can build on. When it looked like both games were destined for regulation losses, they managed to salvage a point in each game to continue banking valuable points in the Central Division landscape. Scott Wedgewood didn’t have his strongest performances this week, but the Avs managed to position themselves to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat despite coming up short in both games. Trent Miner had an admirable effort in relief during his first taste of regular season action against Carolina, allowing no goals in through regulation or overtime, and surrendering only one goal in the shootout session. Instead of folding against both Utah and Carolina, and they demonstrated that they can put themselves in a position to win when the deck is stacked against them.

(Of course, it helps when they don’t stack the deck themselves.)

Coming into this afternoon’s game against Boston, the Avs remain atop the Central Division, sitting just one point ahead of Winnipeg and Utah (both teams sit in second and third place, respectively). A win today in Boston would give them a welcome boost of confidence, not to mention preserve their slim division lead, before heading to New Jersey to face the Devils on Sunday.

The Avs remain one of only two teams without a regulation loss this season (Vegas is the other).

Projected Lineup*​

Forwards:
Artturi Lehkonen – Nathan MacKinnon – Martin Nečas
Gabe Landeskog – Brock Nelson – Valeri Nichushkin
Ross Colton – Jack Drury – Victor Olofsson
Zakhar Bardakov – Parker Kelly – Gavin Brindley

Defense:
Cale Makar – Devon Toews
Josh Manson – Brent Burns
Ilya Solovyov – Sam Malinski

Between the Pipes:
Scott Wedgewood
Trent Miner

*The Avs recalled Jack Ahcan and Danil Gushchin from Loveland prior to leaving Denver. It is currently unclear as to whether either player will see action this weekend.

Boston Bruins​

After the 4-1 loss to Colorado last Saturday, Boston has continued to struggle. Consecutive losses against Utah, Florida, and Anaheim have extended their current losing streak to six straight games. Their offensive game has been sound, as they’ve scored at least two goals in the past three games since facing Colorado. David Pastrnak recorded six points in the previous three games (3G/3A/6PTS) and remains the team’s leader in goals (5), assists (7), and points (12). Pavel Zacha is second in team scoring with two goals and seven assists for a total of nine points. Former Avalanche center Casey Mittelstadt is tied with Elias Lindholm for third place in goals scored (3).

Boston’s goaltending tandem has also struggled this week. Joonas Korpisalo has started two of the previous three games for Boston: a 3-2 decision against Utah this past Sunday, and a 7-5 decision against in Anaheim this past Thursday. Jeremy Swayman saw action in a 4-3 defeat this past Tuesday at the hands of former captain Brad Marchand and the defending Stanley Cup Champion Florida Panthers. He was in goal in the loss to Colorado last week, and will likely return to the crease today.

Today’s game wraps up a three game homestand at TD Garden. Boston will head to Ottawa to face the Senators on Monday before returning home for a match-up against the New York Islanders the following night. Currently in seventh place in the Atlantic Division, a win today would keep them ahead of last place Tampa Bay, who are action tonight against Anaheim.

Projected Lineup​

Forwards:
Morgan Geekie – Elias Lindholm – David Pastrnak
Pavel Zacha – Casey Mittelstadt – Viktor Arvidsson
Tanner Jeannot – Fraser Minten – Michael Eyssimont
Jeffrey Truchon-Viel – Sean Kuraly – Mark Kastelic

Defense:
Mason Lohrei – Charlie McAvoy
Nikita Zadorov – Henri Jokiharju
Jordan Harris – Andrew Peeke

Between the Pipes:
Jeremy Swayman
Joonas Korpisalo

Source: https://www.milehighhockey.com/colo...-afternoon-to-do-is-a-bruin-redux-for-the-avs