How a leap of faith put the Avalanche on the path to chasing history

I remember where I was when Patrick Roy quit on the Colorado Avalanche in August of 2016. I was getting in my car to drive to the Colorado Media School to record a podcast with my old pod partner, J.J. Jerez. We weren’t sure what to talk about in early August as we waited for training camp to open a few weeks later.

Roy sure gave us something to talk about that day. We speculated about all kinds of names replacing Roy. One name we never touched on but absolutely should have was Jared Bednar, who was fresh off leading the Lake Erie Monsters to the Calder Cup, the AHL’s championship trophy.

Bednar was hired shortly after Roy left the organization in the lurch and never really had a chance to implement the program he wanted top to bottom. The truncated timeline meant everything had to be rushed.

Jared Bednar’s first year as an NHL coach saw a team that had Nathan MacKinnon, Gabe Landeskog, Mikko Rantanen, Matt Duchene, Erik Johnson, Tyson Barrie, and Semyon Varlamov win just 22 of 82 games that season. Between regulation and overtime, that club found its way to sixty losses.

Sixty.

“For a first year, that’s about as tough and miserable as they come,” Avalanche captain Landeskog said. “I can only imagine as a first-time coach in the NHL…but he’s stayed firm on his beliefs and his system in the way he wanted to play and wanted us to play. The last few years, we’ve got a lot of belief in him and the system as well.”

Bednar himself admitted earlier this year he wondered if that would be his only NHL shot knowing that guys who don’t find immediate success struggle to get second opportunities.

Avalanche general manager Joe Sakic said he wasn’t interested in making another change. He believed in Bednar and that made it easier for him to give the coach a full offseason to implement his full vision.

“I don’t look to make changes,” Sakic said. “I like to work with what we have and get to the next level. I think [Bednar is] a tremendous person, got a good pulse on the team and he’s got a lot of respect from the players. You keep those guys. In my mind, in the history of the league, teams like to make changes with the coaches but I’m opposite. I believe the players on the ice are the ones making the difference in the games. The coaches set them up for success with the systems but once it’s time to play, players are the ones that are winning or losing games out there.”

Connecting with his players was something Bednar struggled with that first year, but once the core players bought in, Colorado found new life.

MacKinnon and Rantanen ascended to All-Star status under the tutelage of Bednar and Landeskog, who had previously asked Sakic not to trade him because he wanted to be part of the solution in Denver, reached new highs in his career playing as the hard-working element next to his superstar linemates.

It was who Bednar is as a person that allowed him to connect with his players and get them believing they could be better than they ever had been.

“He’s a good communicator, able to talk to the guys about what he wants from us and expects from us,” Landeskog said. “At the same time, he’s an easy guy to be around.”

That ability to reach his players was a huge boon for a coach helming one of the league’s youngest teams. Colorado turned the organization to its youth in Bednar’s second season. Duchene’s departure added 19-year-old Sam Girard to a lineup already brimming with rookies Tyson Jost, J.T. Compher and Alex Kerfoot.

“He’s still believing in me and helped me throughout my career as a young guy,” Jost said. “He’s been my coach for my whole career so there’s been a lot of building blocks.”

Those four rookies, along with Colorado’s newly-minted three-headed monster and other young players such as Sven Andrighetto and Nikita Zadorov shocked everyone by making the postseason just one year after the 48-point disaster. Sakic’s decision to retain Bednar was looking smarter by the day.

His ability to usher in the development of young talent continued to be vital as the Avs were soon joined by the rosy-cheeked assassin himself, Cale Makar, in the middle of their first-round playoff series against the Calgary Flames.

Now, a lot of coaches in the NHL are hesitant to play rookies because they are unpredictable and the unknown is far more concerning than understanding a player’s limitations, even if they are significant.

Bednar, however, went full send with Makar, who was fresh off winning the Hobey Baker Award as college hockey’s best player and leading previously-moribund UMass to the national championship. Makar scored in the first period of his first game and averaged 17:22 in Colorado’s unexpected playoff run to Game 7 of the second round.

It was the early trust from Bednar in Makar’s ability to help them that established a strong bond between player and budding superstar.

“He’s allowed me to play the game I’ve wanted to play,” Makar said. “He hasn’t been too forceful in different things but at the same time there are a few things in aspects of my game he’ll come up to every once in a while and say I’ve got to get away from this or he liked me here, stuff like that. I think it’s that balance of positive reinforcement but also the calmness in the way that he talks and brings up those aspects that you also need to work on. In a coach, it’s really important to stay calm at all times and he’s obviously very cool under pressure. He definitely instills a lot of confidence.”

Developing that trust and building the confidence of Colorado’s burgeoning youth movement helped the Avs reach that second round series against the San Jose Sharks just two years after that lost season. It was encouraging, but not enough.

Sakic was particularly aggressive that offseason, adding Andre Burakovsky, Joonas Donskoi, and Nazem Kadri to the roster as they looked to take the next step. Kerfoot and Barrie were now out, but in their place was the team’s new answer to the question of who could handle the second-line center job behind MacKinnon.

Enter Kadri, the veteran from the Toronto Maple Leafs who had been pushed from the team’s top center to its third line with the additions of Auston Matthews and John Tavares. Kadri was suddenly a luxury in Toronto and the Avs landed the feisty forward.

Fast forward to Kadri’s third year under Bednar’s tutelage and you have another player having a career year, but Kadri isn’t like all these kids building for the future. He’s already 31 and has played for a myriad of different voices in his career. Bednar, however, sticks out.

“He’s a great coach,” Kadri said. “He’s been there for a while. We’ve all together implemented a culture we follow now. He lets me go out there and do my thing. I think I’ve definitely earned his trust on both sides of the puck. I want to try to be as well-rounded as possible and he lets me go out there and do my thing, whether that’s making a mistake, he understands I’ll bounce back. He’s got good awareness for the game and his players. It’s been a great fit.”

There’s that motif again. Trust. Trust in the process, trust that Bednar is coaching with their best interests in mind.

A quick side story that always stands out to me when talking about how Bednar is a little bit different from other NHL coaches. After a particular egregious loss on home ice a few years ago, Bednar was asked why he didn’t bag-skate his team during the next morning’s practice.

Bednar said doing so would only serve him, not his team. He’d personally feel better, sure, but it would be punitive and not proactive and he felt his job was to put his team in the best position to win the next game. Would a regular practice better serve his players or would punishing them with 45 minutes of hard conditioning in the middle of an already-grueling season schedule be better?

Bednar chose a regular practice, and in talking with multiple players after that session, it was something each appreciated.

Trust.

All of this helped Bednar and the Avs build a harmonious relationship and ascend back through the NHL’s ranks. From 48 points in Bednar’s first year to 95 points, then 90 in the third year. Bednar’s fourth year at the helm was the first time the world would be interrupted by COVID-19, and the Avs finished second in the division, just two points behind the St. Louis Blues.

When the NHL resumed, the Avs stomped the Arizona Coyotes in the first round of the “bubble playoffs” but lost in seven games for the second straight year, this time to the Dallas Stars.

There were some mitigating circumstances, such as the Avs losing both Philipp Grubauer and Pavel Francouz during the series and relying on third-string goaltender Michael Hutchinson for Games 5-7, and missing seven regulars for Game 7 of that series, but it was a disappointing loss nonetheless.

Another offseason, another aggressive wave of additions as Sakic brought in Brandon Saad and Devon Toews to help shore up weaknesses at forward and defense.

The Avs followed by winning the President’s Trophy as the NHL’s best team in the regular season in the 56-game shortened season. From dead-last in year one to the top of the standings in his fifth year, there was a certain philosophy that Bednar leaned on to stay true to himself.

“Bloom where you’re planted,” Bednar explained. “Everyone always wants to try to expand their role and grow their role. At the end of the day, you are who you are and you can chip in in other areas and keep adding to your toolbox of skills. I use it a lot with our middle-six forwards, bottom-six forwards. They don’t have to try to be Nathan MacKinnon or Mikko Rantanen to be effective because they don’t have that skill set, but they have to do certain things well and we stress those to those guys.”

After Colorado won its first six playoff games last year, it felt like Colorado was blooming in a way it had during its glory days of Sakic and Roy joined by Peter Forsberg on the ice. This was the revival.

But every rose has its thorns, and the Avs wilted in losing four straight games to Vegas in the postseason, marking their third consecutive loss in the second round. This one, however, had been a team with high expectations of bringing the Stanley Cup back to Denver. It viewed itself as a contender and talked about it throughout the year.

The Avs talked about it, but couldn’t be about it.

“Last year was very disappointing,” Jost said when reflecting on the experience. “We had such a good team and to fall short like that stings. It stays with you throughout the summer and you just have that bad taste in your mouth and that carries over to this year, too.”

The Avs stuck with Bednar again and rewarded him with a two-year contract extension a month into this season. From Sakic’s perspective, it was an easy call.

“He’s a great coach,” Sakic said. “Our players have done a tremendous job under him. We believe he’s the right guy to get us to the next level. He’s one of the better coaches in the game, he’s got a good pulse on this group, the players respect him and when you’ve got a coach that gets along with the players and they have a tremendous amount of respect for him, you want to keep him around.”

The desire to keep him around was felt not only by Sakic but by Colorado’s stars as well.

“Personnel has changed and the team looks a little different now than when he came in but overall you want to play for a coach that is consistent,” Landeskog said. “You know what you’re going to get out of him and you know what he expects out of you. It helps to know what you can expect from a coach on a daily basis. It’s that consistency that he brings every day. He’s found a really good way of keeping this group together.”

Makar agreed, even adding he might be a little underappreciated outside of Colorado.

“He’s definitely not underappreciated with what he does for our team, but league-wise, obviously you have a team with a lot of skill players but at the same time you have to be able to put them all together and play well,” Makar said. “Any head coach in the league is struggling with the same thing, but [Bednar] does a great job with us. I love him as a coach.”

When asked what Bednar does so well, Kadri found himself touching on a familiar theme.

“You’ve got to play to your personnel,” he said. “That’s what good coaches do, they understand who their players are and what they’re good at. You put them in the best possible situation to have success. I think, especially when you put all of us together, we all know how to play and have been playing for a while, that experience aspect is huge also, but just to be able to send great players on the and say, “Go do it”, it’s nice to have that trust.”

As Colorado has rocketed to the top of the league’s standings this year, Bednar has overtaken the regular-season records in Avalanche history for both games coaches and wins. He’s now the standard-bearer for those two marks. When he talks about it, it’s not hard to see why Bednar’s team has remained so goal-oriented. It starts with him.

“I don’t really think about it a lot,” Bednar said of the records. “I’m really happy to get the contract extension and stay part of the group and try to finish what we started here. I feel like I’ve been here since day one of this rebuild and starting with the tough year and working through that, seeing pieces come and go but our core group working through that and mature into elite players in this league. I’m happy to be part of that. I’ve spent some time thinking about that. The other stuff, half the time I don’t even know until [Vice President of Media and Player Relations Brendan McNicholas] tells me. Same thing with the All-Star stuff, I hadn’t put any thought into it, but I think it’s a good reflection of where our team is at. It’s hard work from a whole organization, from our coaching staff to our players and [Sakic] bringing the vision to our team.”

Everyone talked to for this piece also acknowledged the elephant in the room – accomplishments in the regular season are nice, but winning in the postseason is how a legacy is built.

Those sixty losses in year one? A funny number, that. Over the last 174 Avalanche regular-season games (that’s the last two COVID-shortened seasons and the 48 games so far this year), the Avalanche have lost, yes, sixty games. 35% of the regulation losses in Bednar’s tenure came in 2016-17. It’s been a steady rise to the top.

If they all want this to mean something, they have to do something about it and bring the Stanley Cup back to Denver.

While the theme of unfinished business lingers over all of this, it’s clear the organization, from the front office to the players, are all-in on Jared Bednar being the man to lead them to the promised land.

Trust.