Did the Colorado Avalanche find their goalie of the future at the NHL Draft?

When the Colorado Avalanche arrived in Las Vegas for the NHL Draft, they had the 24th overall pick and then a slew of picks between Rounds 4-7. As they left Vegas, they walked out with a nine-pick haul on Day 2 after trading out of the first round entirely.

It was one of the stranger draft experiences and a strong departure from how the Avalanche have operated at the draft table in this era. It began with a heartbreak that caused the team to decide to trade down and accumulate more draft picks.

It nearly went the opposite direction, however, as sources tell DNVR that the Avalanche engaged in trade conversations with the Chicago Blackhawks, who held the 18th pick, in an attempt to move up and secure the services of a player they coveted and did not think would get as close to them as he did: American forward Cole Eiserman.

The goal-scoring prodigy set the USNTDP’s career record for goals and was a player who was a prime target for teams starting with the 11th pick, but the dropping of defensemen changed the shape of that range in the draft and left Eiserman without a home.

Colorado tried to become that home but ultimately the lack of draft picks to facilitate a move up meant they were waiting and hoping at pick 24. It got close, but the New York Islanders selected Eiserman at 21 and giving us what could be an interesting sliding doors moment in Avalanche history.

With Eiserman gone and the Avalanche feeling confident they could land a player they quite liked a little later, they traded with Utah and acquired picks 38 and 71 this year and a second-round pick next year.

With the 38th pick, the Avs pulled a shocker and drafted the first goaltender off the board, Ilya Nabokov.

It was such a surprise for two reasons. One, the Avs haven’t drafted a goaltender that high since their very first pick after moving to Colorado when they selected Marc Denis. Second, this was widely considered a weaker goaltender class that would not see the run on the position begin until later in the second round.

Already 21 years old, this was Nabokov’s fourth and final time through the draft process and he was finally selected on the heels of a historically great performance in the KHL this past season.

Nabokov had a steady regular season in 43 appearances for Metallurg which was good enough for him to be named the league’s top rookie for the season. When the playoffs began, his game went supernova and he backstopped his team to a Gagarin Cup championship, being named the MVP of the postseason. He is now the youngest winner of that award in KHL history.

The arrow can’t trend up much more than that and the Avalanche clearly liked what they saw to make him the centerpiece of this draft class. It’s not often you think of a goaltender as a guy with a quick path to the NHL, but Nabokov’s contract with Metallurg ends after next season and he could make the leap to North America.

I don’t know that I buy him as part of the NHL vision that quickly, but getting him at least to the AHL opens the door for the possibility.

The main drawback for Nabokov is his size at just 6’1″, which would make him one of the five smallest goaltenders in the NHL. One of the others on that list is Alexandar Georgiev, whose contract also expires after one more season.

Smaller goaltenders are having a moment right now as Georgiev and Juuse Saros maintain full-time starting jobs and two of the best goaltender prospects in the world, Devon Levi and Dustin Wolf, are similar size.

The margin for error is, well, a lot smaller for a goaltender of Nabokov’s stature but it has forced many aspects of his game to excel to help overcome it.

There’s a real hope Nabokov could be the best goaltender in this draft class. While the draft is about projecting to the future, Nabokov has by far the strongest on-ice results of any netminder in this class, giving plenty of optimism about his future.

It’s fair to wonder if the Avalanche making a goaltender who might profile as more of a platoon guy than a full-time starter is the right play with your only top-50 selection. There were several intriguing prospects on the board at 38, but none of them profile as set-and-forget high-impact players in the NHL so the value proposition of getting a guy who could take over your net someday is pretty interesting.

From there, the Avs next selection was another they acquired from Utah at 71, but they traded down five spots and added another fifth-round pick in the process. With that pick, they added a much more “Avsy” prospect.

Here’s a guy who fits the Colorado identity very nicely. Zellers makes up for his concerning lack of size with great speed and a skilled game.

He’s a pace-first player who needs to learn to pick his spots a little better because he has confidence in his great hands and skating to force plays that aren’t there. His lack of size is more about his build than height because he’s slender with not much frame to put on additional weight so he’s either going to have to become an exceptional offensive player or find ways to contribute in the two-way game in order to become an NHL guy.

It’s easy to see Colorado’s interest here as Zellers plays a style that goes well with the Avalanche, but it’s not hard to wonder where the path to success is here. Colorado took a similar player in Jean-Luc Foudy and we’ve seen that Foudy just doesn’t have a clear path forward to NHL playing time as an offense-first guy who isn’t good enough in a checking role yet.

That’s the chance you take, of course, but the road ahead is long for Zellers, who will play in the USHL next year for Green Bay before heading off to North Dakota in the fall of 2025.

The Avs snagged another re-entry player with the 121st pick by taking Jake Fisher from the Fargo Force of the USHL. He’s headed to Denver next season to play for the Pioneers so Colorado will continue the DU pipeline they’ve quietly been building for the last decade with Will Butcher, Logan O’Connor, and Sean Behrens.

Fisher’s game isn’t sexy. There’s not a lot here that will wow you but he was a key cog for a strong Force team in his lone USHL season. He combines excellent habits with good size and it makes him a quality player in his own end.

He has a strong work rate and gets involved as a defensively stout center who gets play going in the right direction. He doesn’t get it going very quickly, however, as his skating needs work and his transition play was lacking.

Once he’s in the offensive zone, he has an excellent shot that profiles as the NHL-caliber skill that he should continue building the rest of his game around.

He’s likely headed for a future as a bottom-line center who can chip in a few goals, but that’s something the Avs have not drafted and developed on their own since Cody McCormick was selected in the 2001 (!!) draft.

I don’t have a lot to say about the selection of Cloutier as there just isn’t a ton of information out there about him.

He was named to the All-Rookie Team in the USHL last season as a member of the Chicago Steel, but that’s about it. He returns to the Steel next season before heading to the University of Omaha-Nebraska in the fall of 2025.

There’s more to say about the third goaltender of this draft class, which is a wild sentence to type out. They had drafted four goaltenders in the last six drafts, so three in one day was pretty wild.

Yunin is well-liked in the goalie community and a player plenty of people are excited about despite only six games played in the MHL last season. The organization he plays for in Russia is well-known for not playing young goaltenders, so it shouldn’t be seen as an indictment of Yunin that the bulk of his playing time came at the Russia U18 level (where he was dominant).

He is expected to be a full-time starter in the MHL next season, which is where Nabokov built his success to eventually taking over the reins at the KHL level when he was Yunin’s age.

This is the ultimate long-term play for the Avs. They jumped on the train early, clearly believing they wanted to get in the ground floor of the build-up of Yunin’s career. Had he gone undrafted and had the kind of strong season some envision for him, he could have been drafted two rounds higher next time through.

When we refer to draft picks as “lotto tickets”, Yunin is the exact type of guy you should think of. It’s a long shot, but if it hits, oh boy could it ever hit.

I was having some fun with this player card because after having selected three goaltenders, two in a row, we were joking that the Avs should take Max Lacroix, son of Eric and current Boston Terrier goalie. That explains the “wrong Max” part.

Curran’s game is actually quite intriguing. Like Fisher, he’s a big-bodied center who is already a strong defensive player and best profiles at the NHL level as a bottom-six center who takes hard matchups and adds a little scoring punch.

The offensive part of Curran’s game is the opposite of Fisher’s, however, as Fisher is a goal scorer through and through and Curran is a crafty playmaker. He scored only five goals in 40 WHL games, but he had 27 assists and was starting to round into form before an injury cost him the second half of his season.

From a tools perspective, we’re not looking at a good skater or shooter, but he sees the ice quite well and has the hands and passing acumen to make things happen for the guys around him.

His willingness to engage physically is a welcome sight. There’s a lot to like here as a player with multiple avenues to playing time at the NHL level if he continues to develop.

Anyone familiar with my work over the years will be rolling their eyes when I say that this was my favorite pick of the day for the Avalanche. It was their only defenseman selected and I am a defense-first kind of guy, so I was excited to see them finally grab one.

My excitement was even higher, though, when it was Pitner they took. He has average size for a defenseman but he makes the most of it by being an incredibly intelligent player who looks awful to play against.

He’s physical but never to a fault. He’s rarely out of position and when he is it’s because his weaker skating let him down, not his reads or positioning. He is a true student of the game already and is a sponge for information.

There isn’t much offense in his game as his puck skills are lacking despite a nice shot that could develop into an underrated weapon in his arsenal.

Pitner is a shutdown defenseman to his core and could someday be a reliable lockdown guy on a bottom pairing if he continues to develop the right way. He’s headed to the right program for that and he will be Fisher’s roommate at Denver next season. Long live the Pio Pipeline.

This was a selection that got me excited. I was expecting the Avalanche to select an obscure re-entry guy who nobody knows much about. Instead, they took Christian Humphreys, who was widely ranked as a top-100 prospect. The dissenting opinion on him was Elite Prospects, who had him all the way down at…112.

That is to say that at pick 215, the Avalanche had to be happy to get a player with the kind of upside you don’t normally get at the tail end of the seventh round. Genuinely, I don’t understand how Humphreys fell as far as he did.

There are real holes in his game as he is a poor skater who doesn’t engage physically. The league is faster than ever and Humphreys plays at a slow, deliberate pace but lacks the kind of puck protection and ability to control the game that players who succeed in the NHL with that kind of profile have.

That said, he’s an excellent passer who sees the ice very well on both offense and defense. He gets involved defensively with a great stick and kickstarts play the other direction because he already understands his role within the game so well. He knows that goals are scored in the middle of the ice and that’s where he pushes play as often as he can.

He’s a wing moving forward but he could be in line to be an impact player at Michigan when he gets there in 2025.

That obscure re-entry guy I was expecting at pick 215? We got him at 217 instead. A Russian-born winger who has spent the last three years playing for Victoriaville in the QMJHL.

He was a point-per-game player with 67 points in 63 games as a 20-year-old. I don’t know anything about him yet but I hope we see him at development camp this week to learn a few things.

How did the Avalanche do on draft day?

It’s a tough class to evaluate. The only player they have to make an ELC decision on in the next two years is Prishchepov. Three of the college-bound players they drafted won’t even begin their college careers until 2025.

Nabokov is the centerpiece and could be the quickest path to the NHL as both the oldest and most established player in the group. His contract situation is one worth monitoring because if he doesn’t re-sign, we could be seeing him hit North America quickly, which slightly changes the outlook of this class (for the better in my opinion).

They have a healthy mix of size, skill, and future roles among the skaters. Only Zellers is a classic Avs pick in being a smaller player with great speed. They drafted skilled wings and two-way centers. Their one defenseman fills an organizational need for a quality defensive defenseman and is going to a college that excels at developing that style of player.

The organization has struggled badly to get quality role players from within their own system and it seemed like their draft philosophy shifted to prioritizing drafting translatable skills that may not have the highest upside but clear-cut paths to playing time in the NHL.

They drafted three goaltenders in the same class, which is rare. The upside of picking three goalies on different timelines, however, is that they may not have to worry too much about them cannibalizing each other’s playing time in pro hockey.

If Nabokov comes to North America quickly, there’s no threat that Cloutier or Yunin lose playing time to him in the AHL. The other two have such long development paths that if they run into each other in pro hockey, it means their development is going well and qualifies as a “good problem” for the Avs.

Colorado has been bleeding assets for years to work on their goaltending problems. The one time they invested a high pick in a goaltender, it was Justus Annunen, who is slated to be the backup goaltender in Denver next season. It’s going well with Annunen and I can appreciate their desire to try to get better at their approach to that position.

I’m not out here trying to grade any of these picks, but I think the lukewarm reception leaguewide to Colorado’s draft is more about the lack of upside in the picks they made. I’m okay with that because for the first time in a while, most of the skaters they drafted fit somewhere in the organization.