Colorado Keeps Adding Forwards. The Problem Is the Forwards Keep Failing.

The Avalanche have now signed Georgii Merkulov, acquired a forward from Nashville, brought in Jaden Schwartz on a three-year deal, and traded away Valeri Nichushkin — all in the name of fixing their depth scoring. Management has been busy. The question I keep returning to, the one I raised back in July when Schwartz first went quiet, is whether any of this activity actually addresses what the numbers say broke them.

Here is what the numbers say broke them: Colorado went 14-15 in one-goal games last season. That 48 percent win rate sits nearly 19 percentage points below where the league as a whole finishes in those contests. Think about what that gap represents in practice. The Avalanche were not losing blowouts — they were losing the games that come down to a single finish, a single secondary scorer converting when it matters. They had the engine to generate leads. They did not have the depth to hold them or extend them in the moments that postseason hockey demands. The Vegas series, where Colorado went up 2-0 and then dropped four straight, was not a fluke. It was a stress test the roster was structurally unequipped to pass.

The depth scoring crisis was not abstract. One of Colorado's forwards generated nearly three shots on goal per game over his final ten regular season contests and scored zero goals — zero, on 29 shots. That is not bad luck at the margins. That is a player creating volume and producing nothing, which is the exact profile that haunts a team when the game is tight and the top line is covered. Management saw it. That is why the offseason has looked like a controlled scramble.

The problem is that the scramble has complications of its own. Schwartz, signed to anchor some of that secondary production, has been unavailable since early July — and training camp is not far off. The Nashville acquisition who was supposed to help was the same forward who couldn't score on 29 shots. Merkulov is a legitimate reclamation bet, a player Boston moved on from that Colorado is now wagering still has something to offer. My read is that Merkulov is the most intriguing of the additions precisely because the bar for him is low and the upside is real — but he is not a solution, he is a possibility.

What makes this offseason genuinely difficult to evaluate is that the core is so dominant it distorts everything. MacKinnon's 83 points in 48 games, Necas's 61, Makar's 55 from the blue line — that group is not the problem and was never going to be the problem. The front office correctly identified that and left it alone. But the right wing position, vacated by Nichushkin, now drops to Logan O'Connor as the primary option, and O'Connor's production last season was a fraction of what a starting right wing is supposed to provide. That is not an opinion — it is the most glaring structural gap remaining on this roster. Schwartz healthy, Merkulov productive, and O'Connor holding his own would make Colorado dangerous again. Any one of those three failing to materialize and the 14-15 problem does not go away; it just gets a new face.

The 55-27 record will draw eyes. The 14-15 record in one-goal games is what should be keeping Avalanche management up at night — and based on the volume of moves they've made, it clearly is. Whether they've actually solved it won't be known until the games are close again and the depth forwards have to finish.