Thoughts and observations on the Avalanche for a lazy Sunday:

• The answer is no. No, while I was optimistic the Avs would be a much better team this season (you can go back into the archives and look it up), I would not have expected this club to be among the top eight in the Western Conference as the calendar turned to March 11. No matter what happens from here, it’s been a great accomplishment by this team.
• What really turned this team around this season? No question about it, it was the Matt Duchene trade. Yeah, the Avs were over .500 at the time of the deal, way back in early November. But the presence of Duchene was still a huge distraction, the elephant in every room home and away. Reporters would stand around wondering if Duchene would talk, but most of the time he’d be in the back, away from prying questions. This awkward dance happened every day, and it got on everyone’s nerves in the dressing room. When the trade happened, it eliminated not only the tension in the room, it allowed the club’s true leaders – Erik Johnson, Gabe Landeskog, Nathan MacKinnon, Tyson Barrie – to be themselves. No more whispering under their breath when asked anything about Duchene. More important, they could take charge more on the ice. MacKinnon started to get more ice time, and look what happened.

• The addition, too, of Sam Girard from the trade has been a revelation. The impact he’s made on this team doesn’t show up so much in the usual statistics; he doesn’t have a lot of points, doesn’t have a gaudy plus-minus. But he’s been so, so steady with the puck. He moves the puck out of the zone with solid consistency. He makes accurate passes to forwards in the neutral zone. And, of course, he’s resurrected the spin-o-rama.
• And there is so much more to come from the trade. Vladislav Kamenev will be a player. Shane Bowers could be a player. Ottawa’s first-round pick either this year or next belongs to Colorado. A couple other draft picks are still yet to be tapped. The Duchene trade turned everything around.
• What keeps me up at night, relatively speaking, about the Avs and their chances of actually making the playoffs? It’s not the absence of Erik Johnson, though it certainly doesn’t help. It’s the goaltending. Specifically: If Jonathan Bernier is going to be out again with a concussion – and as of this writing, we don’t know (UPDATE HERE) – I’m a lot less optimistic they can make it. Semyon Varlamov has just been too inconsistent. It seems like he’s reactive, not proactive, to the puck. The body language just looks a little less confident. You wonder if his body is really 100-percent or not. I think the team really bonded a lot with Bernier during that 10-game win streak. I’m not sure players feel the same level of confidence right now with Varly in goal. They’ll say the exact opposite, of course, but I’m not so sure.
• In case anyone is hopeful of Cale Makar, whose college season at UMass-Amherst ended Saturday night, signing right away with the Avs and joining them for the stretch run, stop now. The Avs will not burn a year off his entry-level contract with a short-term thing like that. Will Makar return for a second season at UMass, though? We’ll probably find out soon.
• It should be quite the atmosphere on the ice for Tuesday’s game in Minnesota. You don’t think the Wild want to knock the Avs down a peg, after taking it on the chin the last couple visits to Denver? The Avs have to be ready for the Wild’s best game, in front of a hostile crowd. It’ll be another good measurement of where this team really is right now.
• The game in St. Louis Thursday figures to be huge, too. The Scottrade Center has just been a haunted house for the Avs, but they’ve got to figure out a way to overcome that, for one game at least.
• The return of Sven Andrighetto has been huge to the lineup I think. His speed helps open up the game a little more for the other forwards. I didn’t appreciate how much he brought to the team until he was gone. Shame on me. It doesn’t look like there will be any supplementary discipline for that two-hand shove to the face of Oliver Ekman-Larsson, by the way. OEL, in fact, was the one fined $5,000 Saturday by the league for slashing Andrighetto.
• If Kamenev returns to the lineup soon – as seems possible – I envision him as a fourth-line center with Alexander Kerfoot and Gabriel Bourque on the wing. That’s not a bad fourth line on paper.
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