Colorado Avalanche Can Afford Slow Start to 2024-25 NHL Season

With one day to go until the Colorado Avalanche kick off the 2024-25 NHL season against the Vegas Golden Knights on Oct. 9, the team announced its opening night roster though certain players may have been temporarily demoted for cap reasons.

My colleague Ryan Womeldorf ran through three reasons why the Avalanche might struggle to start the season and while I do not necessarily disagree with his thought process, I believe that a slow start is not a death knell for the Stanley Cup hopefuls.

As anyone who is familiar with the adage of the tortoise and the hare is well aware of, slow and steady usually wins the race. An 82-game season contains plenty of hills and valleys and a team hitting its stride in the spring is preferable to one running out of steam after the turn of the new year.

With that, let’s dive into how the Avalanche – and other teams – have started in recent seasons, and how they ended up faring in the playoffs.

Avalanche Historically Strong Team During First Month of Makar Era

For this exercise, let’s contain the analysis from the start of the 2019-20 season to the first month of the 2023-24 season. This five-year range encapsulates the time between the first regular season game since Cale Makar joined the team and rounded out the current core and the beginning of last season. It’s definitely a small sample all things considered, but it’s all there is to work with when it comes to the highly successful Nathan MacKinnon-Makar era.

As you can see in the table below, the Avalanche have typically gotten off to fairly decent starts over the past five seasons, with one glaring exception.

The Avalanche sat 10th or better in the overall league standings after the first month of play in four of the last five regular seasons. The one time they fared worse was in 2021-22 when a 6-5-1 start gave way to a 50-14-6 finish and one of the most dominant playoff showings of the cap era.

The Avalanche’s triumphant effort was not a one-off display. As a glimpse at the most recent Stanley Cup champions would tell you, a strong start is not a requirement for any title chasers.

Three of the last five Stanley Cup-winning teams sat in the top 10 of the league standings after a month of play, but two were firmly in the bottom half. Though two of the eventual champions did in fact lead the league after the first month, three out of the five were clearly not the best team at the one-month mark. It’s no secret that hockey is an unpredictable sport, and it’s a claim that is borne out in the data.

While they did not end up winning the championship, the 2023-24 Edmonton Oilers clawed their way to an appearance in the 2024 Stanley Cup Final after starting the campaign with a record of 2-9-1 through their first 12 games. They were ahead of only the hapless San Jose Sharks who suffered through one of the worst seasons of the modern era. They were the victims of an incredibly cruel run of puck luck, but their talent level won out by the postseason.

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The 2018-19 St. Louis Blues just missed the five-year cutoff, but they famously won the Stanley Cup after being dead last in the league standings at the start of the 2019 calendar year. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime turnaround that will likely never be replicated again, but it highlights just how misleading the first month of the season can be in the grand scheme of things.

Avalanche Hoping for Quick Return to Full Strength

Even if the Avalanche get off to a strong start to the 2024-25 season, uncertainty remains. Captain Gabriel Landeskog still lacks a firm timeline for his return from a very documented journey of rehabilitation and there is no guarantee he ever gets back to his previous level of performance. Artturi Lehkonen is out through October and has struggled to stay healthy in recent seasons. Valeri Nichushkin is in the middle of serving a six-month suspension that is set to expire in mid-November, but he still requires league approval before returning to play.

The Avalanche have demonstrated the ability to dig themselves out of a hole in the standings but stacking up a few early wins to build up a cushion comes in handy towards the end of the season when the grind for a better playoff seed kicks into higher gear.

If there’s any team that could hit full strength at the right time after a frustrating opening month, it’s the one who has done it once before and lived to tell the tale.