Avs extend Logan O'Connor for three years

The Avalanche announced on the eve of training camp opening that they had signed forward Logan O’Connor to a new three-year contract.

With O’Connor entering the final year of his current deal, he was part of what is still a robust class of potential free agents that includes Darcy Kuemper, Pavel Francouz, Nazem Kadri, Andre Burakovsky, and Valeri Nichushkin, among others.

That is no longer the case with O’Connor agreeing to the new pact which will payout at $1.05M AAV.

While a three-year commitment to a player who has, up to this point, not even secured a full-time roster spot would normally be a thing that raises eyebrows, O’Connor is a player who is considered a roster lock heading into the start of training camp tomorrow.

With just 22 games played last year, O’Connor’s status was elevated as the offseason went on and Colorado’s depth was hollowed out with the departures of Matt Calvert (retirement) and Pierre-Edouard Bellemare.

There are a number of players vying for various roles on the roster this year but what the team has seen out of O’Connor has been a player who is comfortable in his own skin and with his own limitations, as evidenced by the willingness to sign the contract he just did.

O’Connor could have held out and tried to capitalize on a numbers surge where he gobbled up points and eventually tested the market but he was clearly comfortable in Colorado, where he signed as an undrafted free agent after three years at the University of Denver.

In fact, the recently completed development camp is where the Avs got their first hands-on look at O’Connor before signing him to his ELC back in 2018.

50 NHL games (regular season and playoffs) and eight points (five goals and three assists) later, O’Connor is the proud owner of the kind of multi-year contract some players never get offered.

O’Connor endeared himself to the coaching staff by understanding how he needs to play to be successful and finding a way to get himself to the level required to make an impact in that role more often than not.

A physical player who loves to throw the body who happens to possess blazing speed, O’Connor will now very likely be a fixture in Colorado’s lineup for the next several years. When you start to dig into the underlying numbers, you see two things: small samples but big results.

For example, look at this nonsense:

What you see there is an absolute analytics monster who isn’t any good at finishing and doesn’t play with or against very good players. He’s taking advantage of the weakest competition imaginable, but only in terms of driving possession, not actually adding to the scoreboard.

That’s where his teammates have picked him up a bit as the Avs outscored opposing teams 8-2 at 5v5 last season when O’Connor was on the ice. The year before it was 5-5 but his PDO was just .977.

When digging through some of these numbers, it becomes obvious that O’Connor is a young and talented depth player on the ascent and the Avs got him on a cheap deal that can be buried in the AHL without any real financial penalty if things ever go sideways.

After a summer where it felt like the Avs did a lot of chasing, this is the kind of shrewd transaction we’ve become accustomed to seeing in recent years. This is a move that prioritizes cost efficiency at the fringes of the NHL roster but keeps another player who fits their identity around for the foreseeable future.