Does Sam Bennett make sense for the Avalanche?

Yes. Or no. End of article. Thanks for reading!

Just kidding.

The Avs are just 11 games into their schedule after being paused due to COVID protocols and are slated to return to practice later this week. With some time on my hands, I wanted to take a look at the curious situation playing out in Calgary with Sam Bennett.

Disgruntled players wanting a fresh start in a new city is certainly not an original sports story but I’ve always been intrigued by how teams handle that piece of business during the season.

Things really got interesting when Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman went on the radio and suggested Colorado was a team looking into the Bennett situation (Avs stuff starts about six minutes in). Bennett was a healthy scratch last week just when the Avalanche season paused so the timing was at least curious for those trying to put puzzle pieces (real or imaginary) together.

On a personal note, I find it interesting we’re here now because I’ve always used Bennett as the guy to compare to Tyson Jost. Not so much in playstyle as they’re quite a bit different but in the concept of a top prospect and high draft pick that never blossomed into the high-end NHL player he was hoped to be on draft day but a guy who transformed himself into an effective NHL role player.

As we’ve seen over the years, not all top picks have the ability to go from being The Man to accepting a much smaller role in the NHL. Bennett has consistently done that and now that he’s in his sixth full NHL season, him being drafted fourth overall back in 2014 just isn’t meaningful anymore. He is who he is now.

Okay, but who is he?

The 24-year-old Bennett is a guy whose career-high in points came in his rookie year. An 18-goal, 36-point season as a 19-year-old was supposed to be a glimpse of his future potential but it hasn’t worked out that way as Bennett has failed to crack 30 points since.

Bennett even bottomed out with a 12-point campaign last year, albeit in just 52 games. With the relationship between player and organization clearly on a sour note, he’s off to a predictably slow start with just two points in 11 games.

One of the selling points you hear about Bennett, even from Friedman in his radio hit, is that he’s a center, which naturally provides more value. The reality is a little murkier than that, however, as Bennett has not played at center much this season.

So far, his most common linemate this year has been Mikael Backlund, Calgary’s long-time shutdown center. With just one goal and one assist, it’s clear his work along the wing this year hasn’t been any better than it was last year when he slotted in on the left wing next to Derek Ryan.

In his last 63 regular season games, Bennett has just 14 points.

That offensive production is only acceptable when a player is excelling as a specialist somewhere in the lineup. Looking through Bennett’s role, it isn’t clear exactly what he’s providing the Flames right now other than a physical presence.

Of Bennett’s 147 minutes played this year, 129 have come at even strength. He’s ninth among Flames forwards in PPTOI and six in SHTOI so he’s not playing a meaningful role on either special team unit.

Given that he’s taken just 21 faceoffs this year and has only finished above 50% success rate in the dot, you can’t make an argument he’s a faceoff specialist either.

So, to recap:

• He’s not providing meaningful offense
• He’s not contributing to special teams
• He’s not a faceoff specialist
• He’s not even playing center anymore, which was a significant part of his appeal

Okay. Why have the Avs looked into Bennett at all then?

If you’re familiar at all with the Tyson Jost conversation, and if you’re reading this there’s pretty much a zero percent chance you aren’t, you know it revolves around his ability to drive play, not necessarily finish it.

The same appears to be true of Bennett here with the added caveat that he plays a very different style than Jost.

Bennett’s physicality is notable as he has recorded over 100 hits in every NHL season and he has 23 in his 11 games this year. He plays with an edge, a certain level of agitation that Colorado certainly lacks without the presence of Matt Calvert in the lineup.

Now, given the bullet points above, the conversation surrounding Bennett as a J.T. Compher replacement is obviously misguided. It’s not where the Avalanche should be looking to get something from Bennett.

No, the conversation about why the Avs would be interested in Bennett and how he’d fit has more to do with Val Nichushkin in my opinion.

Nichushkin had a great bounce-back year with the Avs and earned his two-year extension in the offseason but his offense this year (three points so far) has been nothing inspiring despite his predictably strong defensive play (though not as strong as last year’s performance…so far).

With Bennett, the Avs would be able to replace some of what they’re missing with Calvert’s absence and add a more play-driving version of Nichushkin to their lineup. Let’s take a look at some of the fancy stuff on Bennett.

Simply for comparison’s sake, this is Bennett head-t0-head against Compher the last three years.

Bennett’s numbers are even better when you look at his isolated shot impacts. Note: Positive numbers on offense are good, negative numbers on defense are good. The more red on offense, the better. The more blue on defense, the better.

In the above, we see that Bennett makes a decent Calgary offense even better. Maybe more importantly, he makes a slightly below-average defense notably better. That was just Bennett’s isolated impact last year.

If we look at this season, we’ll see an unhappy player with an uncertain future playing exactly like it.

And finally, looking across his entire career we get a sense that this is a player who is more of a play-driving offensive type than the Nichushkin shutdown guy.

To be honest, I went into this look thinking the idea of making a move for Bennett was probably short-sighted and not worth it. After looking through the analytics a bit more, this is exactly the kind of profile Colorado has targeted the last couple of years.

The big questions remaining in this discussion are, to me, the trade cost and how he fits into the team.

Finding a new home in Colorado

I’ve mentioned Nichushkin and Calvert as part of this equation. The point of adding Bennett isn’t so much to replace Nichushkin but to get a similar profile and continue rounding out their group.

I look at Bennett as a more offensive version of Nichushkin – one drives offense, one prevents it, their point production is pretty similar in the end and they could either work really well together or combine to solidify the left side of a forward corps that already has strong play-drivers in Gabe Landeskog and Brandon Saad at the top of the depth chart.

Bennett also brings that nastiness and stronger physical game with him. He also brings an impressive playoff resume, where he scored eight points in 10 games for the Flames last year and had five points in the five-game series against Colorado two years ago.

It’s easy to look at his 19 points in 30 playoff games (13 in his last 15) and think he’s a guy who steps up in the bright lights of the postseason. The exact opposite has been true of Nichushkin, who has six points in 32 playoff games (just three in 15 with Colorado last year).

It adds another feather to a cap that could certainly use a few more (what kind of cap is this, anyway, that needs all these feathers? Is it Mario’s winged cap from Mario 64??).

Where Calvert comes into play here is if Colorado was seriously poking around a deal for Bennett, it speaks to a distinct lack of confidence the Avs have that Calvert will return this year.

In the final year of his contract, Calvert’s injury issues have been most notable in the postseason but he is a player who has never been able to stay healthy from the start of a regular season through the playoffs. Already out and with the most unpredictable of injuries, the investigation into Bennett signals to me an organization planning for an immediate and long-term future without one of their heart-and-soul players.

The last topic here is trade cost.

The price of doing business

Friedman mentioned the Flames were after a similarly aged player and potentially a draft pick. If we’re picking off Colorado’s NHL roster, the guys who standout the most are J.T. Compher (25), Nichushkin (25), Jost (22), and maybe Ryan Graves (25).

Bennett’s contract is expiring this year and he is entering the final year of RFA eligibility so acquiring him is doing so with a multi-year commitment in mind.

The salary cap situation across the league is comically complicated right now but come the actual trade deadline, there should be enough wiggle room for most teams to be able to handle moving lower-salaried contracts like that of Bennett ($2.55M AAV). It’s really down to the players each team prefers.

Adding Bennett and subtracting Compher means Jost and Pierre-Edouard Bellemare are the third and fourth-line centers in some order. Adding Bennett and subtracting Nichushkin would be a straight one-for-one replacement while adding Bennett and removing Jost would basically be the same but getting three times more expensive in the process.

Adding Bennett and removing Graves is actually an interesting idea. Not that the Avs have buyer’s remorse on the new Graves deal (it will take a lot more than 11 games to create that kind of feeling), but that Colorado’s defense has taken a pretty big step forward as a group this year and I can’t shake the feeling that Conor Timmins or Greg Pateryn could provide at least 80% of what Graves gave them last year if given a long-term role.

At this point, we’re looking at Graves as no more than a third-pairing player on a stacked Colorado defense that is going to get even more competitive in coming years as Drew Helleson and Justin Barron push for NHL jobs before the three years on Graves’ deal are up.

In this case, adding Bennett would give the bottom six some kind of look like:

Nichushkin/Bennett-Compher-Donskoi
Bennett/Nichushkin-Bellemare/Jost-Jost/O’Connor

Health will always sort some of that out but at least you can see where the Avs would be in preparing for life after Calvert. Adding Bennett, already unhappy with his role in Calgary, and asking him to play the fourth line certainly isn’t what he has in mind for a fresh start but with that combination of players, I would expect them to function more like two third lines than a tradition third/fourth combination.

It’s complicated but that’s where they are. As I mentioned above, I came into this thinking “why bother?” and walked out thinking “Okay, at least I can understand the logic to this.” After going through all of this, how do you feel about Sam Bennett as a trade target for the Avalanche?