Schwartz Is Out, the Right Wing Is Empty, and Colorado's Depth Problem Just Got Worse

Start with 0.33. That's Valeri Nichushkin's goals-per-game rate last season — 37 percent of the league median for a starting right wing. The Avalanche traded him anyway, and the logic was defensible: if your starter is producing at barely a third of positional baseline, you move on and find someone who can actually fill the role. The problem is that the someone they found to anchor that rebuild — Jaden Schwartz, signed to a three-year deal at $3.25 million annually — has been unavailable since early July and remains out as training camp approaches. The answer to Colorado's right-wing crisis signed a contract and then immediately became a question mark. That is the offseason math I flagged in this space three days ago, and it has not improved.

The Schwartz absence lands on top of a depth-scoring situation that was already structurally broken before he went down. The forward Colorado acquired from Nashville to supplement the forward group finished the season with zero goals on 29 shots over his final ten games — 2.9 attempts per night, conversion rate of exactly nothing. Gabriel Landeskog, working in a reduced role, went 1-for-25 in that same closing stretch, a 4.0 percent finish that mirrors the broader malfunction. These are not slumps you chalk up to variance and move on; these are two separate contributors going cold in the same window, compounding each other, right when the team needed secondary production most. The Vegas collapse did not happen in a vacuum. It happened to a team that was already running on MacKinnon, Necas, and not much else below the top line.

The numbers at the top are not the problem. Nathan MacKinnon put up 83 points in 48 games — 1.73 per night — and Martin Necas added 61 points at 20-plus minutes a night. Cale Makar's 55-point season from the blue line is the kind of production that wins you games in October and November. The core is legitimate, and management was right to keep it intact. But a 55-27 team that went 14-15 in one-goal games — 19 percentage points below the league baseline of 67 percent — is a team whose margin for error in tight games is already dangerously thin. Playoff hockey is almost entirely one-goal games. Colorado already knew it couldn't close them. Now it's heading into 2026-27 with a right wing vacancy, a new signing who isn't practicing, and a depth forward who couldn't convert on 29 shots.

The right wing depth chart as it stands tells the story plainly. With Nichushkin gone to Columbus — where, for what it's worth, the Avalanche did extract the pick that landed them Egor Shilov at 43rd overall, which is a legitimate long-term return — Logan O'Connor is the only grounded name behind the departed starter at that position. O'Connor is a useful player, the kind of reliable checker every contender needs. He is not a solution to a high-priority positional hole. Schwartz, when healthy, was supposed to be the bridge to something more stable. Right now he is neither healthy nor stable, and training camp is not far off.

My read is this: the Avalanche are not a broken team. The offensive engine — MacKinnon, Necas, Makar, a defense corps now anchored by re-signed Burns and Kulak — is still among the best in the conference. But the team's ceiling and its floor are being set by the same problem they had last spring: what happens when the top line doesn't dominate a shift, and the depth is asked to produce? Last year the answer was 14 wins in 29 one-goal games. This summer the answer was supposed to be Jaden Schwartz. Right now, Schwartz is unavailable, the Nashville acquisition went scoreless for ten straight games to close the year, and the right wing is essentially unmanned. The box score from last season already told us this team needed more than it had below the first line. The offseason has not yet delivered it.