Conor Timmins is finding his footing just as the Avs prepare for a playoff run

Remember way back in 2017 when the Colorado Avalanche drafted Cale Makar fourth overall and put the franchise on a completely different trajectory?

Of course you do.

What gets lost in the shuffle sometimes is what the Avs did next. With the first pick of the second round, they selected a player they had ranked in the middle of the first round. Turning down overtures from a number of teams around the league to move down and add selections, the Avalanche sat tight and added Conor Timmins to the organization.

When looking back at the choice, adding two right-handed defensemen known for pushing the puck up the ice made a lot of sense.

Fast forward to this year, the first in which Timmins has gotten legitimate NHL ice time to show his development, and it hasn’t always made as much sense. Timmins, his foot speed always a question mark, has at times looked like an outcast on a defense built around fleet-footed fliers.

Timmins started on opening night with the Avalanche for the second straight season (fun fact!). He was on the ice for three of the four goals St. Louis scored that night in an easy 4-1 win for the Blues. Not great, Bob!

As the Avs slowly worked their way into the season, Timmins struggled to really stand out in a positive manner. He was timid with the puck, often choosing to make the safe play but not one that generated any kind of offense.

Defensively, he was a work in progress. As most rookies do, he struggled with the speed of the game. His skating stood out in a negative light in transition and when trying to recover from mistakes made (by him or others) in the offensive zone.

His ice time was all over the place, too. When the Avs returned from their first COVID pause, they played four straight games against Vegas. The first two, Timmins played 19:00 and 20:15. The next two, he played just 9:52 and 13:22.

The on-ice results were extremes, with Timmins swinging from ~60% CF one game to the 40% range and below in the next. Consistency didn’t exist.

Once again, he struggled with staying healthy. He went back to the AHL and it looked like Jacob MacDonald had secured a job with the Avs. Then MacDonald’s play started to slip and he got hurt during the second COVID stoppage.

Timmins got back into the lineup and showed some real sparks. There was a confidence that had been lacking. His minutes were consistently limited but his on-ice results started the smooth out a bit and his play picked up.

Jared Bednar said on multiple occasions they had liked aspects of Timmins’ game but the consistency was an issue. That’s always the rub for a coaching staff but especially one guiding a team with Stanley Cup-level aspirations. How do you continue finding time to let this kid figure his game out, especially when a carousel of AHL-lifers has done pretty well for themselves in limited action?

Truth is that it’s almost always on the player to force the hand of the coaching staff to keep him in the lineup. Long-term injuries to Bowen Byram and Erik Johnson kept the door ajar on the bottom pairing for players to step up. MacDonald’s bizarre disappearance also kicked open opportunities.

Then the Sam Girard and Ryan Graves injuries happened in the same game last week. Suddenly, the Avs were staring at a defense with just Devon Toews and Cale Makar from its expected main group from the start of the year.

Almost like magic, those two games against the Sharks last week also were the two best games we’ve seen from Conor Timmins. Confidence with the puck, well-timed aggression, solid defense (albeit with some real issues back there, too). He had two assists in the peculiar 4-3 win two nights ago, the first of which was a perfect one-touch pass to Nathan MacKinnon on the backdoor. It drew the brightest smile anyone has seen from MacKinnon in a long time.

The strong performance got me to wondering just how Timmins’ play has held up this year. Naturally, I turned to the numbers. To my surprise, I found a player with strong underlying numbers who was simply struggling to the eye.

As a reminder, a positive number on offense is good and a negative number on defense is good. The percentages are relative to the league average.

The takeaways from all of this is that both Colorado’s offense and defense is a little worse with Timmins but still better than the league average. If you were just to look at the results with Timmins on the ice, you’d be thrilled.

The -25% on defense and +4% on offense mean that he’s doing a great job of suppressing chances and a decent job generating a little offense along the way.

Now, both of those numbers get better without Timmins but it’s not his fault he’s on an elite team that is producing crazy results this season. What’s very encouraging here is that he’s hanging tough and not clearly holding the team back. I went in looking for him to be an outlier (in a negative way) and found a player who has been very respectable this year.

When looking at the actual numbers, things get even more encouraging.

If I did a blind player comparison and said “Player A” had a fancy stats line of:

• 55.80% Corsi For
• 54.51% Shots For
• 44.44% Goals For
• 55.52% Expected Goals For
• 55.71% Scoring Chances For
• 55.43% High-Danger Chances For
• .973 PDO

The immediate conclusion you draw from those numbers is this a hell of a player having a bit of hard luck but otherwise producing the kind of on-ice results that usually result in a player getting big money or multiple years on a new contract (or both, if the player has the production to match).

That’s the stat line Timmins has produced this year. Now, context is extremely important here. All of those numbers would have been number one on Colorado last year (except for Goals For, obviously). This year, Timmins is seventh among seven Colorado defenders with at least 19 games played in the CF% category. The rest of them, Timmins is either sixth or seventh alongside fellow rookie Bowen Byram.

In that context, the numbers are certainly less impressive because it’s obvious Timmins is on an elite team ripping through the West Division this year. I’ll stress again, however, how impressive it is that Timmins is holding his own. He might be at the bottom of those numbers when you realize that MacDonald, Girard, Toews and Makar are all at the top of the league in those categories, you understand what kind of year this defense is having.

In one last visual form, we see Timmins is playing at a reasonable level given his sheltered third-pairing role.

The pros here are that he’s not taking penalties while also not playing against top competition or with top teammates and he’s competitive in driving offense. The cons are his defense is a little iffy and there’s essentially no production to speak of.

All of that tracks with what I’ve already written about his year but also what you see on the box score stats as he’s registered just three assists in his 24 games played. Of course, two of those game in his last game so it’s easy to feel he’s trending up.

That’s the point of why we’re all here (me as the writer, you as the reader). Timmins is trending upward and it comes as the Avs are once again fending off blueline injuries (Graves returns tonight but MacDonald, Byram, and Girard remain out). With Patrik Nemeth struggling to re-adjust in his second Colorado stint, the improved play of Timmins is vital.

It’s also a reminder of the player we’ve waited so long to see after that memorable draft day in 2017. Timmins has gone through a ton of adversity in his career as his concussions issues are well-documented and cost him an entire season of development.

We’re talking about a player here who doesn’t even have 100 games played in professional hockey between the AHL and NHL. At still just 22-years-old, Timmins might just be coming into his own and blossoming into the high-IQ defender he has been projected to be for a few years now.

Maybe just as importantly, his success is serving as a reminder that sometimes young guys just need to play their way through some struggles in order to get comfortable. Not everyone will get the multi-year job opportunity of Tyson Jost and not everyone will drop in and immediately fit on a competitive team as Makar and Byram did.

No, Timmins has had a tougher road to figuring out all out in the NHL. Hopefully, this is just the beginning for him and we don’t look back and see a repeat of what happened with Chris Bigras (initial NHL success, belief he had made it, then a total collapse).

With the Avalanche perhaps overly reliant on Makar, Toews and Girard, Timmins finding another level right now would give other teams just one more problem to deal with and help lockdown a right side that has been in flux all season with Johnson’s long-term injury.

Every year on draft day, organizations select players with the idea of someday seeing them operating together on the ice. In 2017, it was Makar and Timmins manning the right side of a world-class defense. The dream was obvious.

In 2021, the reality just might be even more fun.