Trade Analysis: Ross Colton set to replace Alex Newhook for Avalanche

A day after trading young center Alex Newhook to the Montreal Canadiens, the Colorado Avalanche used part of the return from that deal to find his replacement in landing Ross Colton from the Tampa Bay Lightning.

The final trade came down to Colton for the 37th pick, the later of the two picks acquired yesterday in the Newhook deal.

Colton is currently an unsigned restricted free agent and is arbitration eligible this summer. At 26, and turning 27 in September, this is his final year as an RFA and moving forward will be a UFA.

While not overly large at 6’0″ and 195 pounds, Colton plays a big man’s game and is one of the league’s better middle-six power forwards after his second full season in the NHL last year. He finished the year with 16 goals and 16 assists, a dip from the 22-goal rookie year he had two years ago, but also finished with 188 hits and was on the positive side of the faceoff dot. Let’s dig into his fancystats a bit to get an idea of who he is.

Colton isn’t a great defensive player, but he’s a play-driver on offense and uses his physicality to be very disruptive on the forecheck. Combine that profile with a quality goal-scoring threat, and you have a player who is weaker defensively than you’d like for a third-line center, but the rest of this is a very promising profile.

This is where his appeal to the Avalanche becomes obvious. While he’s several years older than Newhook was, Newhook was (roughly) slated to be the 3C next year and was badly miscast as more of a skilled player. Colton is a physical beast, an extremely competitive player who brings an edge to the ice every single night.

Where Colton separates from a lot of the other really physical bottom-six forwards in the league is that he also has a very real skill in scoring goals. He’s an animal around the net and creates havoc in front of opposing goaltenders but he was also Tampa Bay’s triggerman on their second power play unit last year as they found a way to utilize his impressive one-timer.

Like the addition of Ryan Johansen, bringing in Colton also addresses a deficiency in the faceoff circle as Colton finished with a 56.1% success rate last year. When broken into specifics, Colton was at 55.4% in the offensive zone and 54.8% in the defensive zone. That gives the Avalanche two new guys, Johansen on the right side and Colton on the left, that can give the Avs a much better answer in the specific situations in which faceoffs can be game-changing plays.

When breaking deeper into Colton’s playstyle, you’ll see a player that fills major needs for the Avalanche.

While his playmaking isn’t very impressive and he isn’t a great transition player (especially leaving the defensive zone, my goodness that 10% is bad), he has a shooter’s mentality and is joining a team that at times gets a little too cute with the puck and tries too hard to make the perfect play instead of just firing it on open looks. Colton solves that issue.

If you look at the projections for this year, there are some things that really pop off the page, too.

You look at the penalties drawn category, the deflections, and the forechecking and you have things that the Avs all badly missed primarily in the wake of Gabe Landeskog’s season-long absence last year. Those are all Landeskog strengths and this is an area where Colton has been consistently at his best.

While the Avs will again be without Landeskog this year, in the span of a few days they have added Johansen and Colton as players who make their money going to the net and standing in front of opposing goalies. While they do it very differently (Colton is must more violent in his approach than Johansen), that is an element that was sorely lacking from the Colorado forward corps last year.

When you consider how much the Avs encourage their in-zone offense to run through their defensemen, adding a guy of Colton’s ability to dig pucks, disrupt breakouts, and fight for position in taking away a goaltender’s eyes, his fit is very enticing.

All that said, he is still unsigned and the Avs currently sit with about $15.5 million in salary cap space left this year. The projections for Colton have him right in the neighborhood of a three or four-year deal with an AAV of about $3.5 million.

If the Avs can lock down a deal with him in that area, they will be in very good shape and will have set their center depth for at least the next two years with MacKinnon, Johansen, and now Colton.