Right after Nathan MacKinnon scored the empty-net goal that would ice the Colorado Avalanche’s first-round sweep of the Nashville Predators, I sat inside Bridgestone Arena and forced myself to stop for just a second and appreciate what I was witnessing. 

It wasn’t about the sweep, and it honestly wasn’t even about the result of the series. It was about how we got here, to the place we’re in right now.

My family moved to Denver in 1994, one year before the Avalanche arrived in Colorado themselves. We moved from a place that had no professional sports teams of its own, just two Division 1 universities whose sports programs were mediocre at absolute best.

When the Quebec Nordiques arrived in town and became the Colorado Avalanche, finding immediate success, I remember specifically my mom saying how cool she thought it was to have a team that represented the state and the community.

That 1996 Stanley Cup run is what ignited my passion for hockey. My entire family was hooked. I found everything around the house that I could fashion into a hockey stick to smack make-shift pucks around until my dad finally bought me a real stick of my own (along with the rest of the gear needed) and got me on a team. I think that was mostly to keep me from destroying the house any further, but that’s neither here nor there. 

The next almost decade of Avalanche hockey is what we now refer to as the “glory days.” Season after season of being Stanley Cup contenders, and what felt like a non-stop parade of future Hall-of-Famers taking the ice for the Avs on a nightly basis.

I remember watching those great teams, and I remember watching the great players make show-stopping plays night after night. Now that I look back on it though, it’s clear to me that, as a young kid, I didn’t fully appreciate WHAT made those early-2000s teams perennially elite.

As the first round of the 2022 Stanley Cup Playoffs got underway, and the Avalanche took to the ice for their first postseason practice, two days before their series with the Predators got going, I arrived at Ball Arena and I’m not kidding when I say this… there was a different energy in the air throughout the entire building. 

Practice was scheduled to start at 11:00 AM, but about 20 minutes before that, every player was on the ice. There was an undeniable intensity amongst the players on the ice. After the final month or so of the regular season, I had forgotten what it felt like for a team to be this dialed in. 

I don’t think there was anything the Avs did down the stretch that was “bad” (other than the results of some of their games), but it was obvious that they were playing very loose, and were just showing up to the rink having fun. Not a bad thing, but it did cause you to wince every so slightly and wonder about their ability to flip the proverbial switch in time for the postseason. This group had shown all season long that they could dial up their play when needed, but would they be able to do the same when it came to the mental side of things?

The postseason is as much a mental grind as it is anything else, and it’s part of what so many talk about being the toughest hurdle for teams to overcome. Many never do. In my opinion, this is what has been missing the last couple of seasons for the Avs. Their rosters have been as deep as you could hope for, and their high-end talent is on the highest-end of the league, but they just haven’t been able to get over the hump.

Yes, I know, there are several caveats to those consecutive second-round losses, but it was the loss to Vegas last year that solidified the fact that this team just wasn’t ready to win. They didn’t have the mental toughness to push back when they got punched in the mouth. 

That series left a mark on the Avalanche core. They’ve referred to it all season long. The players and coaches have talked at length about how much they learned over the course of those six games, and it seems to have shaped them in a way that none of their past playoff losses have. 

I think the biggest reason is that for the first time with this core, there was no excuse. There were no injuries you could point to, no extenuating circumstances, and certainly no reason why they would be looked at as “just happy to be here” like they were in 2018. The only thing the team and its players could say about their second-round collapse was an admission they simply had to be better.

While I’ve been around this team for the entire season and felt like I had seen a ton of mental maturity relative to last season, it was at one of the first press conferences of the postseason that I really got a sense that the mindset was totally different this time around. 

“The depth is awesome, but we’re gonna have to drive the bus though,” superstar Nathan MacKinnon said on the eve of the Predators series. “We know that. Everybody needs to chip in, but it’s up to our top guys to drive the bus and that’s what we’re looking to do starting tomorrow night.”

“We can’t win the Cup tomorrow, we just gotta take care of the first 10, first period, first game against Nashville. Get a win, if not, it’s all good. We’ll regroup. You know, you gotta get four so, It’s really hard to win a series and we’re looking forward to getting going.”

Now, there are a lot of hockey cliches in there that you have to sort through to get to the real meat of what Nathan MacKinnon said. For me, where his comments became ear-catching for me was talking about regrouping. It’s just such departure from what you normally hear guys saying ahead of a new playoff series starting. 

For years we’ve heard NHLers (including Nathan MacKinnon and other members of the Avalanche) talk about how important the first game is, and setting the tone, getting off on the right foot, not chasing the series.

All season long what has been so impressive to me about this Avs team has been the way they have approached games. The entire team seems bought into the idea of trusting your process, playing to the system, and putting in the work first. Do those things, and more often than not, the results will go your way. 

Well, they did those things all season long, and the results went their way a franchise-record setting amount of times. I had been curious to see how that mindset would translate to a playoff series though, I wondered if the public expectations would cause them to abandon that identity and prioritize a fast start in order to quiet any potential critics. 

Clearly, that wouldn’t be the case. MacKinnon made it clear, regardless of what happened in the first game, the Avalanche believed in their group and in their process enough that they felt as long as they took care of what they could control, ultimately they’d come out on top.

I walked out of that presser, impressed with what I had heard, and went back out to the ice to watch the Nashville Predators go through their first practice of the series, and the difference was palpable.

It wasn’t like they were out there with skates on their hands or anything, but all of that noticeable intensity from the Avs’ practice session was completely gone. Nashville’s players were on the ice laughing, joking, flipping pucks around the ice somewhat carelessly. There’s something to be said for staying loose, but this was beyond that.

The final score of Game 1 ended 7-2, but honestly that score may even be closer than the game actually was. The Avs completely dominated from the first puck drop, until the final buzzer, but again… the most impressive part of the night came at the podium after the game. To a man, the Avs’ message was focusing on Game 2.

Do you know how easy it would’ve been to put on that performance and feel like you’ve got things sewn up? How easy it would be to fall into the trap of “we’re just better” and take your foot off the gas?

It was just another sign that this team took last year’s result to heart, and wasn’t just speaking in cliches. 

Game 2 was arguably even more dominant and had it not been for the heroics of Connor Ingram, the score could have been equally as lopsided. Games 3 and 4 were a little bit tighter in terms of the play on the ice, but it was clear who was in control for all four games. 

Like I said off the top though, this it wasn’t about the results, it was the way the team carried itself from game to game. They just looked more dialed in, more focused, it felt like they were so prepared that they expected to win. Even in Game 4, when they fell behind in the third period, on the road, against a desperate team, the Avalanche looked like they were expecting a puck to go in and tie (and eventually win) the game, so long as they trusted their process.

I keep going back to last year’s series against Vegas, the Avalanche got away from their process when things got tough, and it ended up costing them the series. It was a loss born out of self-imposed mistakes, and now because of that, the team has repeatedly said that what they expect from themselves far exceeds what anybody from the outside (fans, media, etc) would expect from them. They know what mistakes were made, they know where things went wrong, and they know what has to be different.

“There’s high expectations, I think our guys are really aware of what happened last year, and they’re eager not to repeat that, and push through,” Jared Bednar said after the first-round sweep. “We’ve been doing a lot of talking about mental toughness, and momentum swings and turning the page when something happens. Playing with confidence and swagger, but not arrogance. So those are discussions we’re having a lot.”.

Confidence and swagger, but not arrogance. I wasn’t expecting Bednar to sum up what I had thought of this team all season so perfectly with one sentence, but he absolutely did. 

They have never looked like they think they’re above anything. Like they’re too good to work, like they’re too talented to lose… they have gone out and earned every inch they’ve gotten, and because they’re willing to (and have) put in the work, they have earned the right to play with confidence and swagger. 

That’s a step you see teams and players skip all the time. They want to jump straight to having swagger and having fun, but forget to put in the work first. In my opinion, that’s exactly what happened to Colorado last year. They were feeling good, forgot to put in the work, then didn’t know how to work their way back to the good feeling again when it went away.

All season the Colorado Avalanche have been building towards this postseason. They know what the goal is, and they now know what it’s going to take to get there. 

“I just think our mindset from the start was, we were all so dialed in, our focus was so sharp, everybody knew their job and what they had to do,” Avalanche defenseman Erik Johnson said. “Just the collective buy-in from every guy was so high. You could just feel it in the room with guys talking, just the desire we had to get the job done. You could feel it resonate through our locker room through every guy. Is that maybe a little mental toughness? Yeah for sure, but I just think the desire and the want that we have to win is so high. You feel it every time you step on the ice or go in the locker room.”.

I mentioned those late-90s and early-2000s Avs teams earlier, and how it didn’t occur to me at the time what it was that made them so great. It was the desire to win. Sure those teams were littered with GREAT players, but players like that don’t just show up at game time and have everything come together for them, they put in the work.

For the first 10 years of existence, the Avalanche were an elite franchise because of the mindset they implored from day one. “It’s all about commitment” has been written on the wall in the Avalanche dressing room for decades, and it’s something that was woven into the fabric of those first two Cup-winning teams. 

There is so much hockey left to be played in these playoffs, and the mental hurdle still must be cleared as the second round gets going against a very good St. Louis Blues team. But every year when the season starts, you take a step back to weigh out who are the playoff contenders, and who are the true Stanley Cup contenders? Not just the teams hoping to get in and see what happens from there, but the teams who are coming in prepared and understanding of what it takes to climb the toughest mountain there is to climb in professional sports.

After their performance in the first round (in addition to an almost unbelievable regular season) there is no question about it; this Avalanche team is more ready than they ever have been for the challenges that still lie ahead of them, and start a new era of glory days.