Avalanche Roundtable: Best Avalanche rookie season

It’s been a while since we’ve had a roundtable as the topics continue to dry up with very little going on and another month or so to go until training camps get going and such.

As awards balloting wrapped up this week, the fate of the Calder Trophy is up for discussion. Cale Makar’s brilliant rookie year is going head-to-head with Quinn Hughes of Vancouver as each side digs in and everyone else is jealous they don’t have either on their teams.

If Makar wins, he becomes the fourth Av to win the trophy since the franchise moved to Denver in 1995. There have also been six Avalanche rookies who finished in the top five of Calder voting. All of this to say, there have been a lot of good rookie years in Avalanche uniforms.

This all got me to thinking about today’s topic: Is Cale Makar’s rookie season the best in Avalanche history?

AJ: I’ll say no, despite it being a great year for Makar and certainly one to remember. It’s the only year in which two rookie defensemen broke the 50-point barrier so that alone feels like it takes just a touch of the shine off Makar’s season. But the rookie year I think gets lost in Avalanche history was that of Paul Stastny’s. The 78 points he put up are still the fifth-most since 1995 and the only reason he didn’t win the Calder was that Evgeni Malkin had an 85-point year and took home the hardware.

Stastny’s season still sits as the second-best of his career and maybe provided some false hope for what his career would look like but purely in the vacuum of rookie years, I still think it was Colorado’s best.

Evan: I’ll go against the grain and say yes, Makar had the best rookie year in Avs history. What Stastny did was great, but it came right out of the lockout when scoring was absurdly high with power plays and the refs really limiting obstruction. Makar scored this season at a rate almost equal to Stastny, despite being a defenseman, a tougher position to jump into the league at.

Makar was seventh among defensemen in scoring this year, despite having played fewer games then everyone above him (next closest was 66 to Makar’s 57). For comparison’s sake, Stastny, as great as his rookie year was, was the 17th highest scoring center that year. The league is different now, and that’s what makes what Makar did even more impressive.

Rudo: I hate to be boring and agree with AJ but Stastny’s rookie year stands alone in Avs history. His rookie year had as many assists as Cale Makar’s had points. Yes, he did get to play with a 100-point Joe Sakic and a near-prime Milan Hejduk but rookies who came before had those players and more when it comes to Tanguay. On the flip side, Makar has had the benefit of playing behind the Three-Headed Monster with regularity. The only real knocks you can put on Pauly Walnuts is his rookie year came at a time where the NHL was in flux and scoring was up quite a bit.

Stastny is a good lesson in the fact that a rookie year is just one year. That’s what makes Makar seem so special; this feels consistent and repeatable for Cale.