Colorado's Offseason Math Doesn't Add Up Yet
Start with 14-15. That's the number that actually explains what happened to the Avalanche this spring—not the 55-27 final record, not the +1.21 goals-per-game differential, not even the two-games-to-none series lead they built against Vegas before the wheels came off. Fourteen wins and fifteen losses in one-goal games. A 48% conversion rate in the exact format that playoff hockey defaults to, sitting nearly 19 percentage points below their 67% baseline in all other situations. When the margin shrank to one goal, Colorado became a below-.500 team. Vegas didn't expose a flaw; the regular season already had, in plain arithmetic, for anyone who cared to look past the standings.
That structural problem—an elite team that bleeds in tight games—is what the offseason moves need to address. And here is where the front office's logic gets genuinely interesting, and genuinely risky. The biggest subtraction is Nichushkin, traded to Columbus on June 25. By the numbers, Nichushkin was already a moderate concern: his production sat at roughly 50% of league median for right wings, a positional hole the depth chart now makes vivid. With him gone, Logan O'Connor and Jason Polin are the next names on the right wing depth chart. That is not a close-game solution. That is a close-game problem with a different label.
The addition meant to offset that departure is Jaden Schwartz, signed July 1 to a three-year deal at $3.25 million per year. On paper, Schwartz is exactly the profile you want in a tight game—a veteran who has spent his career in playoff environments, someone who understands the compressed decision-making that one-goal hockey demands. The issue is the "Out" designation attached to his name since late June. A player who can't play is not a close-game solution either; he's a roster entry and a question mark. Until Schwartz is confirmed healthy and integrated, the Avalanche have traded a known quantity—even a below-median one—for a veteran whose availability for next season is genuinely uncertain.
Then there's Ross Colton, acquired from Nashville in mid-June. The shot-generation numbers are encouraging in one sense: nearly three shots on goal per game in his final ten contests. The conversion number is not encouraging in any sense: zero goals on 29 attempts. Zero. That's not a slump you can wave away as small-sample variance when your team's core problem is failing to score the goal that decides a one-goal game. Depth scorers who can't finish are depth scorers who can't solve the 14-15 problem. My read is that Colton's fit remains genuinely unresolved, and betting on his shooting percentage normalizing is a faith-based argument, not a structural one.
What is unambiguously working is the core, and it's worth being precise about how elite that core actually is. MacKinnon posted 83 points and a +48 rating in 48 games. Necas put up 61 points at +42. Makar contributed 55 points from the blue line with a +29. Artturi Lehkonen, often overlooked in the conversation, finished at +34. These are not players who lost to Vegas because they stopped being good. They lost because when the margin tightened, the secondary contributors—the Coltons and the depth wingers—didn't convert, and the team's close-game infrastructure collapsed under the weight of carrying its stars. The re-signing of Burns and Kulak stabilizes the defensive depth, and Burns himself posted 25 points at a strong plus-rating, which matters. But defensive depth wasn't the primary diagnosis.
The honest assessment of Colorado's offseason is this: they identified the right wound—depth scoring, right wing production, close-game fragility—and then applied bandages of uncertain size. Schwartz, if healthy, could genuinely help. Colton could find his finish. The core is so dominant that even a modest improvement in secondary production might be enough to flip that 14-15 record toward something more sustainable. But "might" and "if healthy" and "could find his finish" are not the language of a team that has solved its problem. They're the language of a team that has acknowledged its problem and placed several bets on it resolving itself. The 2026-27 season will tell us whether those bets were