How ‘unprecedented’ roster turnover reshaped Avalanche for another Stanley Cup run

Ray Ferraro was preparing to call a Colorado Avalanche game recently for ESPN when something struck him as he put together his pregame notes.

He went and found his notes from an Avalanche game early in the 2024-25 season to compare. Then it hit him.

“It’s like they’re from a different season,” Ferraro told The Denver Post. “This isn’t even close to the same team. I think it’s really quite incredible what they’re attempting to do here.”

The Avalanche, for the eighth consecutive season, qualified for the Stanley Cup Playoffs this spring. This team believes it can win the Stanley Cup, just as it did in 2022. That has been the expectation for this group for years now.

But how the Avs got here is unlike anything this franchise has seen. And there’s an argument that it’s unlike any season any club that fancies itself as a title contender has ever had. The Avalanche used 49 players this season. A 50th dressed but didn’t play.

That’s a figure typically reserved for clubs competing for the No. 1 pick, not a championship. There were an incredible amount of injuries, but general manager Chris MacFarland and his team also made a series of stunning in-season trades to completely reshape the roster.

What remains is a team that caught fire over the second half of the season and enters the playoffs as a legitimate contender.

“It’s bold. There’s no question about it,” said E.J. Hradek, who will be part of NHL Network’s “NHL Tonight” crew during the playoffs. “They identified that they weren’t going to be good enough with the roster they had, the goaltenders they had. … A lot of teams don’t act in that manner.”

‘It wasn’t by design’

Colorado acquired 11 players, via eight in-season trades, who played at least one game for the club this season. That’s four more than any other team in the league, and the most in a single season since the franchise moved to Denver, per NHL Stats.

Three teams traded for seven players. None of those clubs is still playing. The Avs, who open a blockbuster first-round series Saturday night with the Dallas Stars at American Airlines Center, are not only still playing, they believe this remodeled roster can win 16 more games.

“It wasn’t by design,” MacFarland said. “We weren’t sitting there in October going, ‘You know, we’re going to have to change the goaltending,’ or anything like that. I think it’s just one of those years where things just sort of fell into that sort of track.

“Our guys, top to bottom, did a good job collecting points. Was it always easy? No. But they did a good job battling and making sure we were staying with the pack. The management team felt like we still have a good team here, and just if we can find a way to tweak it and get deeper, it would be a really good hockey team.”

The start of this season felt calamitous. The Avs lost their first four games. Injuries mounted. The underlying numbers were solid, but both goaltenders were scuffling and the club was dead last in save percentage.

That’s where the wholesale reconstruction started — in net. Not only did the Avs trade Justus Annunen to Nashville for Scott Wedgewood on Nov. 30, they made it a double swap by adding Mackenzie Blackwood in a multi-player trade that shipped Alexandar Georgiev to San Jose.

No NHL team had ever traded both of its opening-night goaltenders before Christmas. Seventeen days and five starts later, the Avs signed Blackwood to a five-year contract extension.

“Aside from the fact that it wasn’t working with Georgiev, from what I understand, he’s kind of a headache to deal with. It was, again, bold to get out in front of it and take a chance on Mackenzie Blackwood,” Hradek said. “He’s a guy we saw in New Jersey with all of the ability in the world, but he was kind of immature. He’s kind of gotten things together and he’s got a lot of talent. They took the chance and they signed him.”

Trading for Blackwood wasn’t the splashiest move of the eight. It didn’t cost the Avs the most or best assets. But it is hard to trade for a starting goaltender in the middle of a season.

And of all the players Colorado traded for, Blackwood was arguably the riskiest. He’s never started an NHL postseason game. His previous numbers were inconsistent, albeit with mostly lottery teams in front of him.

But he’s become one of the most consistent goalies in the NHL over the past four months. The Avs are sixth in save percentage since the day Wedgewood arrived on Dec. 1.

“I give full credit to our goaltending department with our analytics guys and our scouts. This was a guy we were very, very bullish on. We felt this was a guy whose game had another level to hit. I think (goaltending coach) Jussi Parkkila deserves some of the credit with the work on both guys,” MacFarland said.

“We feel like we’ve got goaltending as maybe the most solidified it’s been, certainly during my time working with Joe (Sakic). We feel good about that moving forward.”

‘It feels almost unprecedented’

The biggest trade shook the foundations of the franchise and sent shockwaves around the NHL. It also helped set more trades in motion.

Colorado’s players were enjoying an idyllic January evening in Boston when Mikko Rantanen walked down the hallway of the team hotel to find out from MacFarland that he had been traded to the Carolina Hurricanes. Franchises that are in the middle of a championship contention window do not trade the third-best player from a title-winning core in the prime of his career.

Rantanen was in the final year of his contract. The two sides had not found a solution on an extension. How the final days before the trade went down have been the source of much speculation and reporting.

Teams also do not trade players like Rantanen in the middle of a title contention window, then come out of it six weeks later with a roster that is clearly better on paper. But it would be hard to argue that’s not the case in Colorado.

“(Rantanen) is a great player, but one of the things that did was it gave us some chips we didn’t have before and it gave us some cap space we didn’t have before,” MacFarland said. “We just felt that as long as our guys continued to do their thing, we would try to improve the team. The things we did, we feel it made sense.”

A couple of the other moves have looked like big wins for Colorado’s pro scouting department. The Avs added defenseman Ryan Lindgren, whose play away from Adam Fox in New York drew plenty of criticism. He is away from Fox in Denver, and he’s been a solid depth defenseman for the Avs.

Colorado effectively traded its slumping No. 2 center (Casey Mittelstadt) for a No. 3 guy (Charlie Coyle), but the latter has produced more like a No. 2 in recent weeks and his coach, Jared Bednar, can’t say enough positive words about his impact.

Then there is the other trade that, in most years, would be the biggest a club might make. Colorado traded its No. 1 prospect, Calum Ritchie, as part of a hefty package of future assets to the New York Islanders for Brock Nelson, a pending UFA who is now the club’s No. 2 center.

The Avs have moved into the same neighborhood where Tampa Bay and Vegas reside — damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. No draft picks in the first three rounds of the next two drafts? A cupboard nearly bereft of prospects with impact potential?

That’s something to worry about when there isn’t a championship to chase.

“They have (Nathan) MacKinnon, and they have (Cale) Makar and they’re trying to win right now,” Hradek said. “The picture they’re looking at is we’ve got really high-end players in the prime of their career, and we have to try to win right now. And we have to try and keep this window open for as long as we can.”

So here are the Avs, on the eve of a titanic matchup with the Stars, the club that has knocked them out of the playoffs in two of the previous five seasons. It feels like there have been at least three versions of this team this season, and maybe four.

That doesn’t even take into account the final potential addition in a historic season of adversity and reconstruction: The Avs may have captain Gabe Landeskog in the lineup Saturday night for the first time since June 26, 2022.

Landeskog lifted the Stanley Cup that night. So much has changed in the three years since, but also an incredible amount of change occurred in a 99-day span, from Nov. 30 to trade deadline day. Eight trades. Two new goalies. Three new centers. A potential Hall of Fame member sent away in his prime. A beloved player from the 2022 team, defenseman Erik Johnson, welcomed back.

It’s been a season unlike any other in Denver. But, just as Landeskog appears ready to return, the Avs hope all of the adversity and all of the moves lead them right back to where they were the last time the captain played.

“In one sense, it feels almost unprecedented with a team that was thought of to be a good team at the start of the year, to completely undo your goaltending and your center position in the midst of the season,” Ferraro said. “I don’t recall somebody making five changes to six possible spots.

“That to me seems incredibly bold, but also in a sense kind of ruthless. Like, ‘Look, we’ve got Makar and MacKinnon at the tops of their game and we’re just not good enough around them.’ It’s one thing to acknowledge that, and then quite another to go do it and make the pieces fit.”

Trading places

The Colorado Avalanche roster has been completely overhauled since the team’s opening night loss at the Vegas Golden Knights. Here’s a look at how the lineup changed from Game 1 of the regular season to Game 1 of the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Opening night

Projected playoff lineup

* Was injured during the game, missed 32 of the next 36 games

Want more Avalanche news? Sign up for the Avalanche Insider to get all our NHL analysis.