With a week to go until the Colorado Avalanche‘s first game of the 2024-25 NHL season, the team will enter the campaign with a number of key players on the sidelines for a myriad of reasons.
Team captain Gabriel Landeskog is still in the middle of recovering from multiple injuries and surgeries, the latest of which occurred in May 2023. Landeskog last played over two years ago in Game 6 of the 2022 Stanley Cup Final and has seen his timeline for a return shift multiple times since that appearance.
Winger Artturi Lehkonen has not participated in preseason activities and is set to miss the beginning of the season due to his prolonged recovery from offseason shoulder surgery.
Related: 3 Bold Colorado Avalanche Predictions for the 2024-25 Season
Valeri Nichushkin is currently serving a six-month suspension related to his violation of the terms of Stage 2 of the NHL/NHLPA Player Assistance Program and is eligible to return (pending league approval) in mid-November.
Those three players represent half of a fully healthy top-six forward group for the Avalanche and their absences put undue pressure on the stars who will be in the lineup come opening night. If the organization hopes to put the relative disappointment of the past two postseasons behind them, their two leading superstars must perform at peak levels until the return of their supporting cast – let’s dive in.
MacKinnon Looking for Repeat of Hart Trophy Win
Avalanche center Nathan MacKinnon captured both the Hart Memorial Trophy and the Ted Lindsay Award for the first time in his career last season. He has been named a finalist for the Hart on three other occasions, and two others for the Lindsay.
MacKinnon tallied 140 points (51 goals and 89 assists) on the season to rank second in the league in scoring, breaking through the 50-goal, 80-assist, and 140-point thresholds for the first time in his career. He scored nine more goals (Mikko Rantanen had 42), 20 more assists (Cale Makar had 69), and 36 more points (Rantanen had 104), than his next most productive teammates in each respective category.
MacKinnon’s consistency and dominance were on full display all season long as he scored at least one point in 35 consecutive home games, the second-longest home point streak in NHL history behind Wayne Gretzky’s 40 straight during the 1988-89 campaign.
All of this is to say that MacKinnon has become indispensable to Colorado’s cause. He plays more than almost any other forward in the NHL (second behind Rantanen in average time on ice in all situations), fires the highest rate of shots on net, and is an enormous net-positive in terms of penalty differential (plus-16).
Awards voters often elevate a player’s case in their minds if their supporting cast is weakened, whether due to injury or a disparity in talent down the lineup. If either Rantanen or Makar joins the aforementioned trio on the Avalanche’s list of absences, MacKinnon’s case for a second-consecutive Hart suddenly becomes more formidable.
Makar Hoping to Reclaim Norris Trophy Crown
With all due respect to the sharp-shooting Rantanen, the Avalanche’s blue line maverick Makar is MacKinnon’s primary sidekick and the proverbial straw stirring the team’s drink.
Makar scored 21 goals, 69 assists, and 90 points in 77 games last season, a scoring pace of 1.17 points per game that ranks fourth among all defenders in the past three decades. Those numbers all rank with the top three of the Avalanche’s single-season scoring leaderboard, with his tallies of assists and points unmatched in franchise history.
Makar is often flanked by Devon Toews who functions as his defensive conscience on arguably the league’s best defensive pairing. It’s a symbiotic relationship born out of necessity. Apart from those two, no other Avalanche defender eclipsed 30 points last season leaving the four-time Norris Trophy finalist to bear the brunt of the puck-moving workload from the backend.
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The Avalanche recognized this problem and in tandem with pre-existing supporting pieces in Toews, Samuel Girard, and Sam Malinski, added the likes of Erik Brannstrom and Oliver Kylington this offseason to partially relieve Makar’s offensive burden.
Only eight defensemen played more minutes per game in all situations on average than Makar, and very few logged at least two minutes per game in each game state, including on the penalty kill.
Makar has gradually built his résumé for the Hockey Hall of Fame over the past few seasons, already fulfilling three out of the five unofficial criteria I identified in my ongoing series of articles. All that is left is to continue accruing points and keeping healthy enough to hit the requisite games played threshold.
With the Avalanche starting the new season shorthanded, Makar must wield his influence over all facets of the game as he has done so in his career to date.
Avalanche Need Superstars to Perform
While the Avalanche can point to their success in the face of turmoil last season as a reason for optimism, they face greater pressure to get off to a decent start due to the increased competition in the Central Division.
The Dallas Stars and Winnipeg Jets – the other two Central teams to record a minimum of 50 wins last season – were slightly depleted this offseason, but the remaining teams shored up the talent level at the bottom of the division.
The Nashville Predators swung for the fences in free agency while the new-look Utah Hockey Club bolstered their blue line with a pair of bold trades. Even the rebuilding Chicago Blackhawks fortified Connor Bedard’s scant supporting cast and should be a thorn in most teams’ sides this season.
The Avalanche are in tough to avoid the early-season turbulence but assuming everyone returns at some point, should be considered one of the leading Stanley Cup contenders in the spring. Can MacKinnon and Makar keep the ship afloat until then?
