61 losses paved the way for Colorado's bright future

 

It’s hard to build a Stanley Cup contender. It might be even harder to build a 48-point team. In the summer of 2016, with a front office later revealed to be in turmoil, that’s just what Joe Sakic & Co. managed to do.

It’s odd looking back on it because at the time Colorado’s approach to free agency and the summer as a whole was met largely with a shrug but a slight thumbs up overall.

Instead of going for a splashy (and ultimately costly) deal for aging talent like they had the two years prior with their acquisitions of Jarome Iginla, Brad Stuart, and Francois Beauchemin, the Avalanche were far more measured in their summer approach.

Former DU stars Patrick Wiercioch and Joe Colborne signed with the Avs after not being tendered qualifying offers by their former clubs.

Fedor Tyutin was signed after being bought out by Columbus as the Avs were banking on getting a healthy season from the rugged Russian after years of injuries had slowed him considerably.

Journeyman Ben Smith, who had been a key depth player in Chicago’s last title run, was brought in for experience and reliable depth.

Training camp PTO players Rene and Gabe Bourque were signed to standard contracts after impressing in the preseason.

All in all, this was a measured approach. The general idea was to support Colorado’s stars and give them big minutes to continue to grow and develop their own games while also incorporating a few young players they were high on, such as Mikko Rantanen and, later, J.T. Compher.

On paper, there’s just no way the team should’ve been as bad as it was. The team even started out fine, going 9-9 out of the gate before the wheels fell off the bus with a six-game losing streak. The final result?

Nine wins in the first 18 games; 13 wins in the last 64 games.

Since the 2005 lockout, their 165 goals scored is the fifth-lowest total, the 287 goals against are the seventh-most, and the 12.6% conversion rate on the power play is the fifth-lowest. But their 56 regulation losses stood alone.

Yet, from the ashes of that roster, you can start to see where Colorado’s current promise was born.

It was the first year of Colorado’s current top line and while they recorded modest totals back then, there was plenty enough promise found in the Nathan MacKinnon-Mikko Rantanen duo that it wasn’t hard to dream of better days for the franchise.

While that trio still had Matt Duchene running with it, this was the season where he decided he’d had enough and put in his trade request around Christmas. His trade has a chance to go down as one of the most fruitful in NHL history.

Colorado’s defense, when healthy (which wasn’t often), at least had some promise as Erik Johnson and Tyson Barrie combined with Nikita Zadorov to give the Avs real talent back there (Johnson and Zadorov are prepping to start next season in Colorado’s top four).

They were so banged up by the end of the season that when waiver claim Mark Barberio arrived, he was put on Colorado’s top pairing and didn’t even look all that out of place.

The waiver wire also provided the Avalanche an opportunity to snag Matt Nieto from the San Jose Sharks, who very reluctantly placed him on waivers when they simply ran out of space on their roster.

Because Colorado was at the top of the waiver order, they were able to grab both Nieto and Barberio, who two years later are still in Colorado and could play roles as quality depth pieces. That’s a far cry from Barberio’s short-lived stint next to Johnson and Nieto’s time on the second line with Duchene.

Along with Rantanen, that season also provided NHL debuts for Compher and Tyson Jost, who played the final six games of the year after finishing a great freshman season at North Dakota. All three should be in Colorado’s top nine next year.

The one position where there has been complete turnover is in net.

Semyon Varlamov was shut down in December after having hip surgery to fix his oft-balky groin problems, giving Calvin Pickard a shot as the starter.

Pickard had been fantastic the previous year in a backup role but after producing just 21 quality starts in 50 games played, it became obvious he wasn’t fit to be a team’s number one netminder.

Jeremy Smith and Spencer Martin combined for 13 appearances, only one of which Colorado actually won.

After Varlamov and Martin departed on July 1, that entire group is now gone from Colorado and Philipp Grubauer is now the lead goalie with unproven Pavel Francouz backing him up.

That 60-loss team was a master class on the effects of organizational instability. It was fraught with front office drama spilling over thanks to Patrick Roy quitting in August after allegedly losing a power struggle over personnel decisions.

The competing ideals of a coach who was obsessively driven by winning and a front office looking to push the reset button finally came to a head and the lost 2016-17 season will forever be the remains of the fight for control.

The numbers are ugly everywhere you look. Of the 37 players who appeared in an Avalanche sweater that year, 21 are out of the NHL entirely just two summers later and that doesn’t include fringe NHLers like Pickard, Rocco Grimaldi, and A.J. Greer.

From that group, just seven are expected to have significant roles on the Avalanche this year.

The honorary eighth is Cale Makar, who was Colorado’s draft-day prize for all that losing. That team was so cursed, so inept, so unbelievably prone to losing it couldn’t even win the draft lottery. And somehow the Avs appear to have made the best of its 61st loss.

It only seems to be karmic justice that Colorado appears to have landed one of the 2017 draft’s best players after tumbling all the way from the first pick to the fourth.

In the words of Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, “If you’re ever going to see a rainbow, you have to stand a little rain.”

In the wake of that lost season, Colorado is finally ready to go searching for its pot of gold.