Sakic's Depth Gamble Is Already Coming Apart

Victor Olofsson is gone. He's back in Vegas, "happy to be back," per the reporting — which is a polite way of saying Colorado couldn't hold him. That single transaction is more diagnostic than any preseason talking point, because Olofsson was supposed to be part of the answer to a problem I've been circling all week: this team finished last season with four high-priority positional holes and addressed exactly none of them with durable solutions.

Here's the number that frames everything. Colorado's offense fell to 2.5 goals per game over the final ten games of last season, down from 3.6 in the prior twenty. That one-goal-per-game collapse happened while the defense was at its best — 1.5 goals allowed per game in those same ten contests. The elite core held the structure together. The depth group couldn't convert. That's the problem Sakic spent the summer trying to solve, and it's the problem that is now, visibly, still unsolved as camp winds down.

The offseason additions were Jaden Schwartz, Georgii Merkulov, and Zach L'Heureux — three players brought in specifically to address secondary scoring. Schwartz missed extended stretches last season before he even got here in a meaningful sense. Merkulov was a bet against Boston's judgment, which is a reasonable wager, but a bet nonetheless. And now Olofsson, who put up 23 points last season in a depth role, has walked out the door entirely. The pieces Sakic assembled to patch the depth scoring are thinning before the puck drops.

What's left behind is a depth chart that the numbers don't flatter. At right wing, Logan O'Connor starts as the top option and is producing nowhere near what a legitimate NHL starter at that position should. At center behind MacKinnon, Nicolas Roy sits at the top of the depth chart and has similarly failed to register meaningful production. On the left side, once you get past Artturi Lehkonen — who was genuinely excellent last season — the next two options on the depth chart have produced nothing. These aren't minor gaps. They're structural holes, and they existed before Olofsson left.

The Avalanche placed Christian Wolanin and Domenick Fensore on waivers this week as the roster takes shape, which tells you the blue-line depth is also being trimmed rather than reinforced. That's fine on defense — Makar, Burns, and Malinski held things together last year, and the defensive structure is real. But trimming the roster while the forward depth remains this thin is a calculated risk that looks less calculated by the day.

My read has been consistent across these pieces: the 57-win record flattered the roster construction. A team that goes 14-15 in one-goal games — a 48 percent rate — is not a team with margin to spare. When the elite core faces sustained playoff pressure, the depth group has to contribute something. Last season, one veteran forward went scoreless on 29 shots over the final ten games. That wasn't bad luck. That was a structural preview. And the offseason was supposed to fix it.

What Sakic built was a gamble that Schwartz stays healthy, that Merkulov proves Boston wrong, and that L'Heureux develops faster than expected. Gambles can pay off. But when one of your depth additions is already gone before the season starts, the margin for the others to be right narrows considerably. Colorado isn't broken. The core is elite and the defensive foundation is legitimate. But the depth scoring void that defined last season's closing stretch is entering this one with fewer bodies than it had in July — and that's not a narrative. That's just the roster.