The Avalanche Spent the Summer Solving a Problem. Training Camp Will Tell Us If It Worked.

Here is what I keep coming back to: Colorado did not lose to Vegas because they ran out of chances. They lost because they couldn't convert them. Ross Colton went 29 shots without a goal over the final ten regular-season games. Gabriel Landeskog, the captain, converted just one on 25 attempts in that same window — a 4% finish rate from a player the organization trusts with its identity. The Avalanche generated the shots. They generated the pressure. And then they went home. That specific, documented, repeatable failure is the thing this entire offseason has been organized around fixing.

The front office's response was surgical and aggressive in equal measure. Trading Valeri Nichushkin to Columbus cleared cap room and shed a postseason underperformer. The Jaden Schwartz signing — three years at $3.25 million annually — was the centerpiece move, the kind of veteran presence meant to bring reliability to a forward group that crumbled under pressure. Georgii Merkulov arrived on a one-year deal, a reclamation project Boston gave up on that Colorado is betting they were wrong about. Zach L'Heureux was added at the bottom of the structure. Taken together, it is a coherent philosophy: diversify the finishing options, stop depending on the same players to convert every meaningful chance.

The problem is that the centerpiece is already hurt. Schwartz has been out since before camp opened with no clear return date, which means the depth Colorado layered around him is now, at least temporarily, the starting point rather than the safety net. This is not a death blow — Merkulov and L'Heureux can still contribute — but it does shrink the margin for error on a roster that already had thin margins. I wrote in September that the offseason bets were in and now they had to pay off. Schwartz being unavailable at the jump is the first stress test of that thesis.

Anchoring everything, of course, is the Makar extension: eight years, $163.2 million, $20.4 million per year, the largest contract in NHL history. Makar is one of only 14 players ever to win multiple Norris Trophies, and he put up 55 points from the blue line last season while logging more than 24 minutes a night. The deal is defensible on the merits. A generational defenseman who drives possession, generates offense, and anchors your power play is worth historic money if anyone is. But the contract also consumes cap space that could have addressed the finishing problem more aggressively, and it places an enormous amount of structural weight on the assumption that MacKinnon, Necas, and the new forwards will collectively solve what Makar's presence alone cannot.

The historical precedent here is worth naming. Teams that build around elite defensemen and trust offense to follow have a complicated record. The Pittsburgh teams of the Letang era were always one injury away from exposure; the Tampa Bay dynasty worked because the forward corps was deep enough to absorb pressure independently of the blue line. Colorado's 83-point MacKinnon and 61-point Necas give them that kind of forward anchor at the top. But the Vegas series proved that the top of the lineup can dominate possession and still lose if the secondary tier goes silent. Schwartz was supposed to be the answer to that specific problem. Right now he is watching from the stands.

My declaration is this: Colorado will reach the second round again. The MacKinnon-Necas-Makar core is too good, the regular-season structure too sound — they finished 55-27 with a plus-1.21 goal differential — for this team to fall short of the conference semifinals. But the question that actually matters is what happens when they get there, and that answer depends entirely on whether the new forwards can finish when it counts. Schwartz healthy changes this calculus. Schwartz unavailable forces Merkulov and L'Heureux to be more than stopgaps. Training camp will tell us which version of this roster Colorado actually has.