Lehkonen Is Earning a Contract Colorado Has No Choice But to Write

There is a version of this Colorado story where Artturi Lehkonen is a nice complementary piece — a reliable two-way winger who plays his minutes, stays out of trouble, and lets the stars do the heavy lifting. That version died somewhere around game eight of this season. Lehkonen has put together the best start of his NHL career, and the Avalanche front office, already navigating one of the most complicated roster situations in the Western Conference, now has a deadline problem wearing a number 62 jersey.

The numbers tell the first part of the story cleanly: 17 goals, 21 assists, 38 points, and a plus-34 in 49 games. That last figure matters as much as the production line. A plus-34 is not the mark of a passenger; it is the mark of a player who is on the ice when this team is winning and off it when things go wrong — which, lately, they increasingly do. Colorado is 5-5 over its last ten games, with a goal differential that has fallen from plus-1.17 on the season to plus-0.7 in that stretch. The team is colder, and Lehkonen is one of the few warm bodies in the forward group.

Here is why the extension conversation cannot wait, and it has nothing to do with sentiment. The depth chart at left wing is Lehkonen, and then a cliff. The backup at that position is contributing essentially nothing by any measure that matters. Gabriel Landeskog, listed third at LW, has been generating chances and missing them at a rate that should alarm anyone paying attention — one goal on 25 shots over the last ten games is not a slump, it is a pattern. When you remove Lehkonen from the equation even hypothetically, the left wing becomes one of the thinnest positions on a roster that is already hemorrhaging at right wing, where the position has gone scoreless on 29 shots over the same ten-game window. This team cannot afford to negotiate from weakness on two flanks simultaneously.

The historical parallel that comes to mind is the mid-decade contenders who let secondary contributors walk because the cap math looked manageable in the moment — and then discovered, usually in May or June, that the player they lost was the one holding the structure together. Colorado has been through its own version of this. The franchise understands what it looks like when a supporting piece becomes load-bearing. Lehkonen, at plus-34 and producing at nearly a point-per-game pace, is load-bearing right now, not supporting.

My read is this: the Avalanche have a narrow window to get this done before Lehkonen's market value becomes a number the organization finds genuinely uncomfortable. Every game he plays at this level is an argument his agent will use in the next conversation. The front office has already been aggressive this offseason — re-signing Brent Burns, locking in Brett Kulak, adding pieces at forward — and the case for moving quickly on Lehkonen is more urgent than any of those moves were. Burns and Kulak are depth and structure. Lehkonen, right now, is the bridge between the elite core and a forward group that cannot finish.

Colorado clinched the top seed in the West at 61-32. That record is real, and it was earned. But the team playing right now is not the team that built that record. Cale Makar is out. The secondary scoring is failing in the margins. The one-goal record — 14 wins, 16 losses — is the most honest thing this roster has produced all season, and it says plainly that when the game comes down to what the depth does, Colorado loses more than it wins. Lehkonen is the one forward who is actively fighting that trend. Letting him walk into free agency while the team is this fragile would not be a roster management decision. It would be a mistake with a very specific cost, paid in a very specific round of the playoffs.