Just before the 2022 Stanley Cup Playoffs, then-Calgary coach Darryl Sutter offered a now-famous quote about playing the Colorado Avalanche in the first round.
“It’s going to be a waste of eight days.”
Technically, the Avs dispatched the Nashville Predators in seven days, but toss in the travel day to Denver before Game 1, and he was bang on. Getting to play the Predators and breeze through a four-game sweep kickstarted a run to the Stanley Cup for the Avalanche.
If Gabe Landeskog is going to lift that trophy again in June, the road is very likely to be much, much harder. The Avs have completely remade the roster during this tumultuous season and have a lineup capable of winning 16 playoff games.
But the path to immortality looks far more fraught right now than it did three years ago.
“We’re focused with what’s in front of us, and what is in front of us is a gauntlet,” Avs general manager Chris MacFarland said. “But I still feel like our guys deserve the opportunity to have these additions made. You never know when you’re going to be back in these situations. We’re very proud of another 100-point season. We think we have a good team. So does Dallas, so does Winnipeg and Vegas and St. Louis and Edmonton, and on and on.”
The road starts Saturday night in Dallas, where the Avs have to knock off the team that knocked them out a year ago. This Stars roster, if it gets healthy in time, is better than the one that defeated the Avalanche in six games last year.
Colorado’s ability to win a championship has increased over the course of this season. The roster is just flat-out better and deeper than it was in October. The Avs are better at center and in goal right now than they were in April 2022.
Their odds of winning the first-round series haven’t changed much, though. We’ve known it was likely to be Dallas for weeks. The Stars have played poorly of late, but they didn’t get worse when they added old friend Mikko Rantanen at the trade deadline.
If the Avs can get by Dallas, they’ll likely face Winnipeg in the second round. The Jets won the Presidents’ Trophy as the best regular-season team in the league. Colorado had its way with Winnipeg last year, but the Jets have a new coach and performed better this season.
Get out of the toughest foursome in the league? Then it’s probably Vegas in the conference final. Even if there’s an upset or two, Edmonton and Los Angeles are very good teams.
Colorado could become the first team since Chicago in 2015 to beat four 100-point teams en route to the Stanley Cup. Dallas, Los Angeles and Edmonton could all pull off that feat as well.
Even though Florida started with a 98-point team last season (Tampa Bay), the Panthers’ four opponents averaged 106.25 points in the regular season. That’s the toughest road to the Cup in the past decade, just edging out Chicago in 2015.
Colorado’s road in 2022 and Tampa Bay’s in 2021 (using 82-game pace in a 56-game season) are the only others to average at least 105 points. If the Avalanche defeated Dallas, Winnipeg and Vegas to reach the Stanley Cup Final and then face any of the top six teams in the East by points (so not New Jersey or Montreal), the Avs would surpass the Panthers with the toughest path to a title in the past 11 years.
The teams at the top of the league are more bunched up now than they’ve arguably ever been. Colorado is eighth in the NHL standings this year with 102 points. The Avs would have been 13th with 102 three years ago.
A flat cap for several years after the post-COVID-19 pandemic helped flatten things out. There’s no team in this tournament field that would be favored against the 2021 Lightning or the 2022 Avalanche in a seven-game series.
Sure, upsets can happen. But even with that, just getting out of the West looks like a much tougher task for the Avs than it was three years ago.
“The cap has done what (NHL commissioner) Gary Bettman wanted it to do competitively,” ESPN analyst Ray Ferraro said. “That’s jam all of these teams together and make it as much of a toss-up as you can.”
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