Fresh off his new deal, Bednar coaches Avalanche to another blowout win

Over the past couple of days, the new city and new arena have been the stars of the show. Pretty much every media scrum started with a question about what coaches and players thought of playing somewhere they never had before. It’s been a really cool thing to experience.

But once the sun went down, and the Colorado Avalanche arrived to the rink, they made it extremely clear who the real stars were.

The Avs flat out dominated the expansion Seattle Kraken in front of 17,151 fans packed into Climate Pledge Arena. They were bigger, stronger, faster, they had more facial hair, it honestly did not look like two teams from the same league for most of the game. Seattle had a bit of a push back in the third period aided by some “keep the game under control” penalty calls on the Avalanche, a couple of which Avs forward Andre Burakovsky described as “a joke” after the game, but either way, it was far too little, far too late for the Kraken.

It was a 7-3 blowout, but the final score was irrelevant. The Avs got going with a Burakovsky power play goal just 4:04 into the first period, and never took their foot off the gas as they got goals from five different players, including a shorthanded tally from Val Nichushkin, a couple of fantastic goals from Cale Makar, and even got a contribution from newcomer Nicolas Aubé-Kubel.

There really isn’t much else to say about this game. The last time the Avalanche played an expansion team for the first time, they were run out of Vegas in a game that accidentally helped change the course of Avalanche history. That didn’t happen this time. The blowout loss, at least, we’ll see about the rest.

So let’s step back a bit here and turn the clocks back say… two weeks. The Avs were off to an underwhelming start, the team wasn’t playing particularly great, and many (not me) began to question whether or not Jared Bednar was the right man for the job behind the bench.

Any thoughts that he would be on his way out of town soon have been thoroughly put to bed, and not only because the team looks like they have started to find their groove again, but also because the Avalanche announced about an hour before puck drop that Jared Bednar had signed a two-year contract extension that runs through 2023-2024.

I couldn’t be a bigger fan of this move. There are plenty of Bednar critics out there, after all, they haven’t been able to get out of the second round of the playoffs in three consecutive seasons. When you really look at the entire picture, he has repeatedly proven to be more right than wrong for the job and helped the organization consistently move forward.

He was put in a near-impossible situation in his first year, being named head coach just weeks before the season was set to get underway after Patrick Roy’s unceremonious resignation.

“He had a tough first season, as we all did,” Avalanche GM Joe Sakic said when he spoke with the media in between the first and second period. “But we stayed with it, and he turned it around.”

To say Bednar “turned it around” is an understatement. His team went from having the worst record ever in the salary cap era to a perennial playoff team… in just one year.

His players understand him, and he understands his players. I’ve said it before on the DNVR Avalanche Podcast, everywhere you look right now, not just in sports, people are looking for individuals that know how to communicate, especially with the younger generations. It’s less of an emphasis on yelling and screaming to get attention and more on understanding what makes people tick, using the knowledge gained from getting to know them to bring out their best.

That’s what I truly believe Jared Bednar does better than perhaps any other coach in the league. If you just watch him at practice, he will often skate laps with the team before practice officially gets underway, having one on one conversations with players, giving them the opportunity to collaborate with him, instead of just talking at them.

“Our ultimate goal is to win the Stanley Cup,” Sakic said. “I believe he’s the right coach for this group to get us there”.

Read that again, as Sakic said he thinks Bednar is the right coach for this group. Not that he’s the greatest coach in history or even the “best” coach in the league, but he’s the *right* coach.

Even just this season, after a bad start and a myriad of injuries, the Avs had every reason to feel sorry for themselves and let the season spiral out of control, especially once superstar center Nathan MacKinnon went down, but Bednar found a way to pull this group together in the face of some early-season adversity, and they look like the hockey team we expected to see when the season started as they just won their fourth game in a row behind their third blowout in the last eight days.

So now here’s the question. Now that some of your most important players are signed long-term, and you have stability behind the bench, can they achieve that “ultimate goal”? Do they have the ability to overcome what looks somewhat like a serious mental hurdle after they fizzled out in the second round again last year? 

Bednar seems determined to prove they do.

“I’m excited to be able to continue the work that we’ve started here,” Bednar said. “We’ve got unfinished business.”

Might as well be the theme for this entire Avalanche season.