Expectations were soaring for the Colorado Avalanche heading into the 2014-15 season after the team won the highly competitive Central Division in their first season under the leadership of head coach Patrick Roy. Things haven’t quite worked out accordingly to plan though – coach Roy’s club currently sits eight points out of the second Wild Card spot in the Western Conference with just seven games left on the schedule and four teams standing in their way.
With the season winding down and a playoff berth growing increasingly less realistic by the day, the Avs find themselves wondering why they couldn’t recreate last year’s magic. The answer is that there’s an assortment of intertwined reasons that the talented squad finds itself on the outside looking in on this season’s playoffs.
They Avs’ young core forgot how hard they worked for their success last season
After taking the league by storm, the Avalanche – specifically parts of their young nucleus of talented players such as 22-year-old Gabriel Landeskog, 24-year-old Matt Duchene, 24-year-old Ryan O’Reilly, and 19-year-old Nathan MacKinnon – took their foot off the gas in the offseason and started the season flat. They didn’t bring the same fire and intensity at the start of this season that helped the Avs win 12 of their first 13 games in the previous campaign. The Avalanche offense is still 25 goals behind what they had produced at this point last season. The hope is that the young players continue to mature and learn the lesson that what they what you did in one season doesn’t entitle you to anything in the next year. They have all heated up and the club has kept pace with playoff teams down the stretch, but the hole they dug at the start of the season was insurmountable. Points are just as valuable in the standings in October as they are in March.
Injuries combined with lack of organizational depth
Colorado ranks second in the league with 430 man games missed to injury. Blaming injuries is nothing more than a tired excuse in this sport, but the Avalanche have missed key players for long stretches and lack the organizational depth to overcome the absences. The Avs showed a sign of dwindling confidence in their organizational depth when they elected to part ways with head scout Rick Pracey in October. Amongst the various injuries the club has struggled through is a knee injury that’s kept top defenseman Erik Johnson out of the lineup for the last 28 games, groin complications that have taken 16 starts from team-MVP Semyon Varlamov, and a foot injury that ended Nathan MacKinnon’s sophomore season after 65 games. Jamie McGinn Patrick Bordleau, Ryan Wilson, Jesse Winchester, Daniel Briere, and Borna Rendulic are all currently out indefinitely or for the season. A handful of other players have missed chunks of time throughout in the season as well. The Avalanche will need to continue to take actions to improve their depth in the offseason so they are better prepared for injuries should they hit next season.
Shutout losses to the Wild in the first two games of the season
The Avalanche started their season with a home-and-home set of rematches with the Minnesota Wild – the team who came back from the dead to knock them out of the playoffs last season. It was the perfect chance for Colorado to get immediate revenge, clear their mouths of the bad taste, and get off to another hot start. But that’s not how it went down. After the Wild beat the Avalanche 5-0 in the opener in Minnesota, the Avs’ second game of the season became a must win. Two nights later, the Wild would post a 3-0 win in the Pepsi Center that had lasting negative effects on the Colorado’s psyche and confidence early in the season. The club stumbled to just three wins in their first 14 games. After the slow start, the Avs were never able to recover – they were dead on arrival.
Struggling power play
Colorado’s pathetic power play currently ranks 29th in the NHL at just 14.1 percent. In comparison, last year’s Avalanche playoff team converted at 19.8 percent. This season, only the cellar-dwelling Buffalo Sabres are worse with the man advantage. Injuries to key power play components certainly haven’t helped the clubs efforts. Still, there has been major regression by players who have been in the line up. Most significantly, Duchene has just five power play points after registering 17 last season while O’Reilly has dropped from 22 to 12 power play points.
Subpar defensive core
If the Avalanche can’t convert on the power play, then they are going to need to strengthen their defensive depth to secure victories. The team’s defense is 27th in the league giving up 33 shots against per contest. They get outshot by an average of nearly five shots per game and have been outshot in an embarrassing 48 of their 75 outings. To make matters worse, the Avalanche have the league’s seventh worst winning percentage when they are outshot at .396 percent. Semyon Varlamov is one of the world’s best goalies but he can only do much when he is getting peppered night in and night out. Johnson and Tyson Barrie are rock solid rising talents ialong the blueline, but the rest of the defenseman represents a bottom five defensive core. There are some solid and intriguing defensive prospects in the Avs’ system that the club is patiently waiting to develop that might be able to help the cause as soon next season.
Nathan is a staff writer for Mile High Sports. He can be reached on Twitter at @TheRealNatron.