Colorado Won 56 Games. Their Depth Forwards Didn't Solve Anything.

Two days ago I made the case that Colorado's defensive tightening was real and earned — that the blue line deserved more credit than the finishing-crisis narrative allowed. I stand by that. But defending the defense doesn't mean pretending the depth-scoring problem disappeared. It didn't. The numbers on that side of the ledger are genuinely alarming, and the offseason moves designed to fix them haven't fixed them.

Here is the number that keeps pulling me back: 29 shots, zero goals. One veteran forward, over the final ten games of the season, generated nearly three shots per game and converted none of them. Not a slump. A blackout. That is the purest distillation of what ailed Colorado's secondary group all year — volume without finishing, activity without production. The Avalanche went 7–3 in those ten games anyway, because their defensive structure allowed just 1.4 goals per game over that stretch. The depth group was essentially invisible offensively, and Colorado won in spite of it. That is a tribute to the blue line. It is not a solution to the forward depth problem.

The solution was supposed to come from last summer. Sakic traded Valeri Nichushkin — who finished with 31 points in 40 games, numbers that look perfectly fine from a depth-wing — and reinvested in Jaden Schwartz, Georgii Merkulov, and Zach L'Heureux. The idea was to cure the finishing crisis that Vegas exposed. What the season revealed instead is that the cure didn't take. Look at the depth chart right now: behind Artturi Lehkonen at left wing, there is essentially nothing producing at a meaningful level. On the right side, the drop-off behind the top option is equally steep. At center, Nicolas Roy — the nominal starter at that position — contributed at a rate that would concern a fourth-line audition. These are not quibbles. These are structural holes on a team that just finished 56–28.

The one-goal game record makes the stakes concrete. Colorado went 14–15 in games decided by a single goal — a 48 percent win rate against a season-wide clip of 67 percent. That gap matters enormously in the playoffs, where one-goal games are not the exception but the norm. The defensive structure that carried Colorado through the regular season gets tested differently in May, when opponents have a week to game-plan around it and the margin for depth-scoring failure shrinks to zero. The Avalanche already know what happens when that margin disappears — Vegas showed them last spring.

MacKinnon's 83 points in 48 games and Necas's 61 keep this team elite regardless. Makar's 55 points from the blue line, paired with a defense corps that held opponents to historic lows down the stretch, give Colorado a genuine structural foundation. None of that is in question. My read is that the question Sakic has to answer this offseason — now that he's confirmed as the permanent GM — is whether the depth acquisitions of last summer can finally produce, or whether a second round of roster surgery is required. Victor Olofsson is already gone, back in Vegas. The forward depth behind the top six remains thin by any honest accounting. The defense won Colorado 56 games. It cannot be asked to win a championship alone.