The good, bad and ugly of the Avalanche summer

We’re into mid-August now and as the Avalanche finished all of their needed business with the signing of Dennis Gilbert to a one-year contract to avoid arbitration, it’s a fair time to look back at the offseason on the whole before we delve into looking at next year full throttle.

It was an interesting summer in Colorado as the Avs finally felt the true squeeze of the salary cap with the raises needed for Gabe Landeskog, Cale Makar and Philipp Grubauer.

Those three cost the Avs approximately $10M against the salary cap last year. After their new contracts, the three will count $21.9M collectively against the cap. That’s certainly one reason why Grubauer is now in Seattle, but we’ll get to that in a little bit.

The crunch of the flat cap just as the Avalanche roster was due for big raises will always be a stroke of terrible luck for them but that’s the way life goes sometimes. It forced the Avalanche into some interesting situations and we saw some familiar outcomes as a result.

Let’s start on the positive side.

The Good

-Re-signing Gabe Landeskog and Cale Makar

The Landeskog contract is the first time the Avalanche has utilized their option to give a player an eight-year commitment. As Landeskog goes into his age-29 season, it’s a sign of just how much Avs management values not only the player but the person.

That’s why I have the Landeskog signing as part of the “good” side of things. It’s a legacy-defining signing. It sets Landeskog up to be an Av for life and the last person to wear #92 in an Avalanche sweater. It keeps Colorado’s captain in place and a culture they’ve worked hard to establish in place. There were plenty of bumps along the way but in the end, both sides knew they were better together than apart.

Makar’s signing was a great way to start the second day of the NHL Draft. While the Avs “only” got him for six years, the $9M AAV was a fair number the day it was signed but has somehow become an even better deal already.

As others have signed extensions surpassing the $9M threshold, Makar has gone from arguably the league’s best defenseman and paid in that range to being the seventh-highest paid player at his position at the start of the 2022-23 season. By the end of those six years, Makar could be a downright steal at that price.

-Low-risk, medium upside deals

Every year, teams make gambles on cheap deals for players they like that they hope can help them but have warts of some kind. For the Avs, they turned to New Jersey to try to answer some of their questions going into the year.

The Ryan Graves trade netted a second-round pick that turned into DU Pioneer-to-be Sean Behrens but also brought back Mikhail Maltsev, whom the Avs are hopeful can help replace some of the lost production on the fourth line.

Maltsev played 33 games for the Devils last year, registered nine points (6G, 3A) and just turned 23. He’s a big-bodied forward who can play multiple forward positions and is entering the final year of his ELC.

My real reason for optimism here is that Colorado’s pro scouting staff has been very good at identifying players around the league who can drop into Colorado and fit their playstyle. Hell, the trade of Graves was them cashing in on the good scouting work that brought him to Colorado in an AHL prospect swap several years ago. If Maltsev can be a legitimate piece, it would be a big win for the Avs.

Similarly, the signing of recent Devils defenseman Ryan Murray was a match that made perfect sense. Avalanche assistant general manager Chris MacFarland was part of the Columbus front office that selected Murray second overall in 2012 and it wasn’t hard to connect those dots when Murray hit the market and stayed out there for a few days.

Murray brings an injury history (more on that later) but is a very solid all-around defenseman that will be a much better stylistic fit than the departed Graves and Patrik Nemeth were.

Murray’s smooth skating and solid puck-moving ability is a better fit into Colorado’s identity than either Graves or Nemeth, both bigger and slower players, but the Avs once again got a little smaller, though at 6’1″ and 200 pounds, Murray certainly can’t be considered undersized by any stretch of the imagination.

Assuming health (again, we’ll get there), Murray is talented enough to play on any of Colorado’s pairings but should find a home as a 4-5 type that is a big part of Colorado’s penalty kill.

Both additions from New Jersey carry little risk but each player has enough reasons to believe they can help the Avs not just sustain losses but potentially push them forward.

The Bad

-Trading anything at all for Kurtis MacDermid

I always struggle to call something “bad” before a player has had a chance to even do anything on a new team in a new system and in MacDermid’s case, even a new position and role entirely.

That said, there isn’t a single thing about MacDermid’s on-ice results that make his acquisition, let alone at the cost of a draft pick (even if it was just a fourth-round selection), very encouraging.

He’s gotten nothing but crushed in his entire NHL career in every situation he has been tried in. As a defenseman, MacDermid’s entire appeal is that he is 6’5″ and understands that standing up for teammates and fighting is his likeliest ticket to staying in the NHL.

Given his atrocious on-ice results, the Avs expressing interest in seeing what he has to give at forward instead makes this a move that at least, in theory, could produce a positive result. MacDermid’s only redeemable NHL skill to date has been his shot.

At forward, he might get to use that shot even more and his size could play a much more effective role. Chipping and chasing and punishing defenders retrieving pucks is what teams do against the Avs but it might be something a remade fourth line with MacDermid (and Maltsev!) might prove more effective at and that’s about the only logic to this deal that I can conjure up.

Trading a draft pick for a guy has been nothing but a terrible player in the NHL but is a great guy in the locker room and who might have to learn a new position in the NHL when your AHL team is brimming with actual talent at forward is just such a confusing way to utilize assets.

In the past, Sakic has been comfortable trading draft picks for players but going out and getting Colin Wilson and Devon Toews were moves that predictably paid off. They were good players before they got to Denver and were good players for the Avs. Hoping MacDermid magically turns it around at a totally new position? It’s pretty iffy, but if that’s the worst move a team made in the offseason, it wasn’t a bad summer of business at all.

-Playing chicken with the starting goaltender position

The Avs really liked Grubauer and wanted to keep him. Grubauer very clearly wanted to stay in Colorado. Anyone who regularly checks his Instagram can tell that he loves the various offerings that come with being rich and living in Colorado. He isn’t just blowing smoke when he talks about it being home.

Then he chose to leave that home and go get paid by the Seattle Kraken instead. While the Avs were offering in the neighborhood of $5M per year in the range of a five-year contract, the six-year deal that paid him $5.9M AAV was just too rich for Colorado’s blood and they lost their Vezina finalist starting goaltender.

Because the Grubauer negotiations carried on a few hours into the opening of free agency, the goalie market very quickly dried up as players flew off the board. Allegedly the backup plan for the Avs was to pivot to Freddie Andersen, but he didn’t want to wait on Colorado’s situation to clear up when he had a chance to land for another Cup contender over in Carolina. He jumped at the chance and Grubauer’s departure meant the Avs were left with no starting goaltender at the end of the first day of free agency.

Colorado found themselves in a bidding war with Edmonton for the services of Darcy Kuemper and the Avs decided this was one war they simply were not losing. They traded a big-time bundle to the Coyotes for one year of Kuemper, who is a UFA himself next summer.

It was the first time Sakic had ever traded a first-round pick and it’s not hard to see that the way the day played out, it was the right call given the market (Edmonton lost that bidding war for Kuemper and is set to run back last year’s duo, which outplayed expectations and still won zero games in the postseason), but the way they got there was a high-wire act and the Avs got backed into paying top dollar for a very talented goaltender but one who carries with him plenty of his own question marks.

The bottom line is you usually win trades when you’re the team acquiring the best player in the deal and that’s where the Avs find themselves in the Kuemper trade right now. The process was a bit haphazard but it was better than walking away empty-handed at such a key position.

-The general loss of depth

Brandon Saad and Joonas Donskoi are gone from lines two and three and the Avs are basically revamping the entire fourth line as Matt Calvert (retired) and Pierre-Edouard Bellemare (signed with Tampa Bay) are gone from the organization and holdover J.T. Compher is likely going back up into the lineup after the worst season of his NHL career.

If Compher moves back up, rookie Alex Newhook might be tasked with filling either Saad’s job or Donskoi’s job depending on where Jared Bednar wants to put Compher to start the season. How Newhook and Compher play will go a long way to determining the success of the forward corps beyond the top line and highlight how much they miss Saad and Donskoi.

The newly-made fourth line has a significant amount of possibilities as cases can be made for up to 11 different players taking those three jobs. It seems safe to assume Darren Helm has one of them locked down while Logan O’Connor and Mikhail Maltsev would appear to be strong contenders for the other two spots right away.

Beyond that, it’s a myriad of question marks from stalled prospects such as Shane Bowers and Martin Kaut to AHL veterans Jayson Megna, Stefan Matteau and Kiefer Sherwood to complete unknowns like Andreas Wingerli and Sampo Ranta.

Suffice to say, it’s a lot more questions than answers right now with the forward depth, which at least looks promising on paper as several of those players should (in theory, anyway) be able to outplay small roles on the NHL club.

Defensively, the Avs lost Graves, Timmins and Patrik Nemeth from the lineup that started Game 6 against Vegas. Bowen Byram will slot in to take one of those jobs and the return to health by Johnson will take another while Murray’s addition fills the last spot. Beyond that, however, it gets to MacDermid and Jacob MacDonald, a very shallow pool of depth.

Gone are Dan Renouf and Kyle Burroughs, who gave the Avs passable minutes when needed and in their place are top prospect Justin Barron and AHL vets Roland McKeown and Jordan Gross. Dennis Gilbert and Keaton Middleton are in this mix somewhere with Nate Clurman a longshot to see any NHL action this year.

It’s nowhere near the depth the Avs had last year as they sustained a myriad of injuries and got yeoman’s work from MacDonald and Renouf in particular. It will be a challenge for the Avs to deal with the uncertainty of youth as the primary source of their depth a year after having so many veterans the organization liked around to fill roles.

The Ugly

-Losing Conor Timmins in the Kuemper deal

I know there are some of you rolling your eyes at this right now but I am once again here to hammer home the absolute importance of having cost-efficient players who outperform their salary brackets when a team is competing for a Stanley Cup.

Because of the absolute need to win the Darcy Kuemper sweepstakes, Timmins was a necessary inclusion but it’s an impact that will be felt immediately. He had worked his way through the rookie warts and was breaking out as the postseason arrived.

The loss of Timmins not only increases the importance of Erik Johnson staying healthy, but it also pushed Colorado to go and sign Murray in the first place to help shore up depth. Now, both Johnson and Murray are good players and, as of today, better than Timmins, but given their rampant health issues throughout their careers, the Avs are now relying on the universe going their way with 33% of their preferred defense.

That isn’t to say Timmins didn’t have his own injury concerns but the concussion problems seem to be well in the past for him and his problems had been more minor bumps and bruises, not the multi-week setbacks we’ve seen from Johnson and Murray, which brings us to the next point.

-Relying on several players with lengthy injury histories to play key roles

Murray and Johnson have already been discussed quite a bit throughout this piece but it’s important to really state here how injury-prone they have been.

Since coming into the league, Johnson has played in just 780 of a possible 996 regular-season games, which comes out to just 78% of the games.

Consider that Johnson is second in Avalanche history in games played among defensemen with 577, trailing only Adam Foote’s 760. It’s taken parts of 11 years for Johnson to get there while Foote’s 760 came across parts of just 12 years.

All of this just to say what we already know: relying on Erik Johnson to stay healthy is a tricky proposition. He’s a quality player when on the ice but availability is the one skill he has yet to master at the NHL level.

Newcomer Murray is in the same boat. He’s been in the league eight years and has played more than 70 games just once and that was back in 2015-16 when he played all 82 games. He might have made it last year had it been a full season as he participated in 48 of 56 games so there’s some reason for optimism.

The third concern here is the largest, both figuratively and literally, in Kuemper.

As the guy taking the starting goaltender job for a team with dreams of competing for the Stanley Cup, Kuemper just has to stay healthy. He’s spent the majority of his career as a backup so his games played numbers are skewed a bit but as a starter for the Arizona Coyotes the last three years, he played 55 games in 2018-19 and then played just 56 games combined the last two years.

Even considering those two years were shortened, Kuemper played less than 30 games in each year. The Avs will simply need more than that from Kuemper given the significant investment. His talent says he’s worth the gamble so it’s a smart roll of the dice, but a riskier roll than a player with less of a recent injury history.

It’s not hard to envision a world where all three get hurt and miss significant time, forcing the Avs to rely even more on their depth, which is nowhere near as high quality as it was last year.

Every team has to take chances somewhere on their roster. That’s just reality in the salary cap world. This year, it will be the Avalanche and hoping for the best of luck with player health.