LOS ANGELES — The Colorado Avalanche spent all of training camp talking about how this season can be different than the last.
Then the Avs spent Tuesday night backing that up.
Colorado outclassed the Los Angeles Kings on opening night with a solid performance and some dashes of excellence mixed in. The 4-1 victory looked completely different than the start to last season, which began with allowing eight goals in Las Vegas and snowballed with three more losses.
“Just no question marks at the moment,” Avs star Cale Makar said. “I think coming into the year like that, where everybody can kind of be together and you know what you’re getting right off the bat, that’s exciting. And I think it shows.”
Several of the Avs’ top performers at Crypto.com Arena weren’t on the roster at the start of last season. Colorado general manager Chris MacFarland overhauled the roster over the course of the year with several seismic trades. The Avalanche also didn’t have Gabe Landeskog, Valeri Nichushkin or Artturi Lehkonen to start the year, and Jonathan Drouin was injured against the Golden Knights.
The theme of training camp was this roster was far more settled. Colorado was healthier. Everyone who arrived in trades had the offseason and camp to get comfortable.
Then the Avs took the ice against the Kings, and they looked … settled. Comfortable. Deep and talented.
“It’s the personnel, the depth, the experience we have in our lineup right now,” Avs coach Jared Bednar said. “We’re starting here pretty healthy. Guys are slotted in the right places.
“Overall, a really good effort, good commitment and good competitiveness.”
One key piece is missing: starting goaltender Mackenzie Blackwood. But the first player MacFarland traded for last year, goalie Scott Wedgewood, looked calm and steady in net. There weren’t a lot of highlight-reel saves among the 24 he made, but the Avs allowed five-plus goals in each of their first seven losses last season.
It was a big part of why Wedgewood ended up with the Avs. The defensive work in front of Colorado’s goalies was also suspect at times in the early going last year.
This defense corps, with Brent Burns in and Sam Malinski shifting over to the left side, had very few hiccups. At one point, the Avs had three goals in the second period and the Kings had three shots on goal.
“I don’t know how many shots they had in the second (the Kings finished with five), but it felt relatively easy for me,” Wedgewood said. “A lot of watching, with the skill sets that we have.
“Guys blocked a lot of shots, made my job relatively easy.”
The most talented player Colorado added last season, Martin Necas, also has the biggest role to fill. While the Avs will see Mikko Rantanen this weekend, the guy replacing him is off to quite the start with a pair of pretty goals.
Nathan MacKinnon looked in midseason form, setting up scoring chances and finishing with a pair of assists. His first point of the night made him the new career leader since the franchise moved to Denver, pushing him past Joe Sakic.
MacKinnon found Necas for the first goal of the season. Makar, who had an incredible play to create Colorado’s third goal, also set up Necas for the fourth on the power play.
“Gotta keep doing it — he’s been ripping the puck all exhibition,” Bednar said of Necas. “He gets in those areas. He’s a guy who can score from distance. He seems to get there a lot, but last year he deferred to other guys a little bit.
“I see him as a goal scorer, and I think he needs to have a good balance of that.”
Then there was the return of the captain. Gabe Landeskog didn’t make any splash plays in his first regular-season game since March 2022. He, Nichushkin and Brock Nelson did look … a lot like they did against the Dallas Stars, though.
Colorado had a 6-2 advantage in shots on goal at 5-on-5 when Landeskog was on the ice. The Avs created 87.69% of the expected goals. If opposing teams are going to put their top defensive players on the ice against MacKinnon’s line, then Nelson, Landeskog and Nichushkin need to punish the second-best options.
Defensive solidity. Better goaltending. Elite offensive skill.
That’s the recipe for the Avs. They told everyone for weeks why this felt a little different.
After scrambling to climb out of a hole at the start of last season, and then the chaos of trade after trade trying to patch the holes in the roster, it was a very run-of-the-mill, news-free training camp.
The Avs were quite happy about that, and how they started Tuesday night.
“We know we have the high-end skill and the talent to put pucks in the net, but you’re just confident in each other,” Wedgewood said. “Confident in the lineup, going into every night, you know you’ve got a chance to win.”
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