Mackenzie Blackwood cements himself as Colorado's goaltender with five-year contract extension

The Colorado Avalanche came off the Christmas break and got a major piece of business finished as they signed goaltender Mackenzie Blackwood to a five-year contract extension worth $26.5 million ($5.25M per season).

Blackwood was acquired on December 9 (his 28th birthday) in a deal with the San Jose Sharks that sent beleaguered former starter Alexandar Georgiev to hockey Siberia. In the four games Blackwood has played for the Avs, he has compiled a 3-1 record with a .931 save percentage. The team loved what they had seen from him as Jared Bednar gushed about his new goaltender.

The trade for Blackwood was expensive given his uninspiring track record of success at the NHL but with Colorado’s season struggling to get off the ground thanks in large part to Georgiev’s major struggles, the Avs felt they had to do something to shake up their trajectory.

Colorado’s belief in Blackwood’s ability to blossom into a big-time goaltender will now be put to the test with the new contract. The risk here is that Blackwood has never been a full-time starter in the NHL and has played in zero playoff games. In the 219 NHL games he’s played in so far, he has only shown glimpses of being a starter-level netminder.

Colorado’s stance on goalies has evolved

The timing of this contract certainly raises eyebrows from multiple perspectives. On one hand, the Avs have been playing it cheap at the goaltender position for a long time now, trading for promising backups looking to become full-time starters in deals for Philipp Grubauer and Georgiev and signing them to cost-effective three-year deals.

The one year Colorado went bigger on the goaltender market was when Grubauer used his success in Colorado to sign a long-term deal in Seattle while the Avs traded a pricey haul to Arizona for Darcy Kuemper. Memorably, they won a Stanley Cup with Kuemper in net as he had a great season in Colorado (his playoff performance was more complicated).

Trading for Blackwood and then immediately giving him a five-year deal shows a major shift in organizational philosophy at the position. They had been fine living on the margins and investing the cap savings into the team in front of the goaltender, believing that if they could continue to find “good enough” at the position they would be able to build a strong enough roster to make the goalie’s job easier to do. Essentially, they were purposely trying to devalue the position financially to try to put that money toward the roster in front of him.

It’s hard to say it hasn’t worked given the regular-season success they’ve had over the last eight years, but Colorado saw its window with Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar, and Mikko Rantanen slipping away with Georgiev’s play deteriorating in front of them. Blackwood was brought in to stem that tide this year and, now, the next five as well.

Financial implications of the deal

There will certainly be some sticker shock to the deal as Blackwood is getting a raise from his current $2.35M AAV to $5.25M. The Avs are perpetually under a salary-cap crunch due to the high cost of their elite talent (and getting more expensive with Rantanen due a new deal this summer) so the days of the Avs paying $4M for their tandem are clearly over.

With Blackwood and (also new) backup Scott Wedgewood signed now, the Avs are set to go from paying $4,237,500 for their opening night tandem this season (Georgiev and Justus Annunen) to $6,750,000 for what is slated to be their opening night tandem next year. With every dollar counting for the Avs, that ~$2.5M increase in cost at the position will mean they have cuts to make elsewhere.

From Blackwood’s perspective, he gets the financial security he has been seeking after the ups and downs he’s experienced so far in his career. With the salary cap slated to make a jump over the next few years, he could have played out the remainder of this season behind a competitive Avalanche team and rolled the dice that a strong postseason run would catapult him into a huge contract in the offseason.

Blackwood chose the security of Colorado instead of chasing an even bigger payday, though there was certainly risk in him turning it down and failing to meet lofty expectations with the Avalanche. In that case, he would not have come anywhere close to the deal he just signed.

From the salary cap perspective, it’s hard to project what it means for the Avs long term because of both the unknown salary cap ceiling for next year and Gabe Landeskog’s ongoing recovery process. Landeskog’s $7M salary looms over the organization at every turn right now.

That said, Blackwood’s deal still feels like a fair price to me if we say that he is a league-average starting goaltender. His $5.25M salary next year is the 17th-highest cap hit for a goaltender (Carey Price is retired so I’m not counting him otherwise Blackwood’s would be 18th).

As new contracts are signed by goaltenders through the life of Blackwood’s deal, this could end up being a major steal by the Avalanche in the long term even if Blackwood never improves from the player he is today.

Speaking of, here is the trajectory he is currently on.

Bottom line for the Avalanche

There’s no denying the Avalanche are taking a significant risk here. If they get this deal wrong, they are saddled with a contract that other teams will not be interested in taking off their hands. They will have to pay assets to move it, then even more to find a replacement at the position.

Of course, that replacement could be Ilya Nabokov, the goaltender the Avs selected in the second round of the NHL Draft last summer. They love him and he’s having a good season in the KHL. His contract expires next summer and he could move to North America if he wanted to. With Blackwood and Wedgewood now on the books, he would have to do so with an eye on playing in Loveland for the Colorado Eagles, but that’s a transition that likely has to happen at some point anyway.

Either way, Nabokov’s clear path to the starting job in Denver is now murkier, but he has a long way to go to even begin seriously having that conversation anyway.

For now and the near future, this is Mackenzie Blackwood’s net.