ST. LOUIS — In a season defined by comically poor injury luck and a pair of ground-shifting trades, the time to figure out who the real Avs are in 2024-25 is running out.
The Colorado Avalanche stumbled through a pair of road games against inferior competition to start the post-4 Nations Face-Off stretch run. Now the team has a season-high six-game homestand coming up, with the trade deadline wedged in there as well.
A month ago, Jared Bednar said it was go time. Colorado is 4-3 since. Just as it’s been for much of this season, nearly every step or two forward was followed by one in the wrong direction.
“This is a huge point in the season for us,” Avs defenseman Cale Makar said. “I think every single guy on this team, we’ve got to prove to management that this should be a group that they invest in. And if we keep having games like this, it’s going to be hard for them to justify it.”
When the Avs swapped out both goalies in a span of 10 days, it seemed like the ship was righted. Then a successful December was followed by a disappointing January.
When Colorado shook the hockey world by trading Mikko Rantanen to Carolina for Martin Necas, Jack Drury and draft picks, a slow start was followed by four wins in five games to enter the midseason break.
The next big question is what will Colorado do next? Will there be a final trade or transaction to complete the makeover? After a game that Nathan MacKinnon deemed terrible, there is reason to wonder whether Colorado will do something now, or wait until the offseason to finalize the roster reconstruction without Rantanen.
“I think that’s the business of the game,” Avs coach Jared Bednar said. “It’s on me and it’s on the players to say, ‘Listen, we’re doing a lot of things right. We’re giving it all we’ve got.’ And then here’s where maybe some holes in the lineup are that we could use something different or something else on top of what we have.
“I think that’s something every team thinks about coming into a deadline, so hopefully we can play well enough here and do enough good things that they’re able to spot what the weaknesses in our lineup that we need to improve.”
Even if captain Gabe Landeskog is excluded, the Avs still haven’t had all of their best players in the lineup for a full game all season. They played about 35 minutes in one contest with the 10 guys Bednar would like to use on the two power-play units.
The Avs hope Valeri Nichushkin could play as soon as Wednesday, the first game of the homestand, against New Jersey. That would be the healthiest the team has been all year, with just defenseman Josh Manson missing from a Landeskog-less optimal lineup.
There are four games before the March 7 deadline, but one is the night before. So it might realistically only be two or three before general manager Chris MacFarland and his group have to decide on a course of action.
Adding another defenseman would certainly help. The Avs have struggled to score goals to the point where Bednar said the team has to realize it’s not “this high-flying, high-powered offense anymore.”
Will Nichushkin alone fix that? Does MacFarland have another seismic move in him?
It might be a huge week for the already re-tooled roster before that.
“It’s going to be on us,” Makar said. “We know as a group we have a lot better than this. It’s just unfortunate that we can’t find the consistency. We played well last night, but just couldn’t find the goals. You just have to get back to it and be better tonight, and unfortunately, we weren’t.”
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